Before letting your child help make cookies or play with homemade play dough, please consider this; uncooked flour can make you both extremely sick. This post came about as I was searching for play dough recipes for my toddler son. Pinterest is full of no-cook and taste safe play dough recipes. The problem is the vast majority are not safe to play with and definitely not taste safe. The reason? Uncooked flour. Uncooked flour is also the reason you shouldn’t consume raw cookie dough, brownie batter, etc. in addition to the salmonella risk from raw eggs. This is not bacteria you want to mess with either; E. Coli, salmonella, and even listeria are possible. Even recipes that use boiling water are not safe, as the water may not cover all particles or get the flour hot enough to kill bacteria.
For this reason, the CDC and FDA have issued warnings not to consume items made with uncooked flour. The CDC even states “do not let children play with or eat raw dough, including dough for crafts”. Even if it is not ingested, a child that has touched it and then puts their hands to their mouth could become sick.
How Does Flour Get Contaminated?
Flour is an agricultural product. It doesn’t undergo any processing that kills bacteria. It can become contaminated from soil, water, or animal waste. Flour is not considered a ready-to-eat food. Why isn’t it treated? Because resources needed to do this for the flour industry are enormous and the costs would be passed on to the consumer. It’s expected that flour will only be used in products that are cooked before eating at home. Heat treating flour can also sometimes have an effect how your baked goods perform and taste. Recently, however, heat treated flour in being used in a few packaged food products. Pillsbury for example, recently started using it in their cookie dough so that it is safe to consume raw should you choose to do so. Check packaging to make sure it says it is safe to consume uncooked.
But I’ve always eaten cookie dough and I’ve never gotten sick….
This may be true, but is it worth the risk? It only takes once. Keep in mind that foodborne illness doesn’t happen immediately. It can take several days before you feel the effects, so people often don’t realize what it is that made them sick and either label it as stomach flu, or falsely blame the last thing they ate. The link below lists the onset of common foodborne illnesses and it may you. Per the CDC, about 48 million Americans gets sick from every year. This results in approximately 128,000 hepatizations and 3,000 deaths. The link below lists the onset of common foodborne illnesses. The onset of symptoms may surprise you.
What can I do to keep from getting sick?
- Don’t eat raw dough batter, or any food containing raw flour. Wash your hands thoroughly after touching raw flour or dough
- Be diligent in cleaning anywhere flour may have touched. This is tricky since the particles are so fine and dusty.
- Don’t use measuring utensils for flour and then use them again for other ingredients without thoroughly washing them in between.
- Always wash your hands with soap and water after handling raw flour.
- Don’t let children play with raw dough or flour.
Can I heat treat flour at home?
This is a big maybe. There are several places online (including a company that sells flour) that mention baking flour on a cookie sheet at 350F for 5 minutes or something similar. Unfortunately, it does not appear that DIY methods are endorsed by anyone in the food safety community or by the CDC. There have been a few studies, but they were not done using home ovens. The primary issue is that flour is very low moisture, making it difficult to reach the necessary temperature to deactivate the pathogens without burning or changing the properties of the flour itself.
Other Safe Options
One option is to purchase commercially heat-treated flour to use at home. At the moment, the only consumer source I’ve been able to locate is from DŌ. I’m currently waiting on my own order to arrive any day! For raw cookie dough, another option is to substitute oat flour. You can make it easily by running rolled oats through your food processor. For safe playdough, there are two recipes below that I’ve created to be both play and taste safe.