What Kind of Eggs?

I learned something new yesterday. You can buy pasteurized eggs!  When I saw a recipe for silk pie in the newspaper that called for pasteurized eggs, I thought it was a hoax or someone who just didn't know better. Wouldn't a pasteurized egg be boiled? After all I think the definition of 'pasteurize' is to heat something, usually milk, to a temperature high enough to kill bacteria.  Heating an egg to that temperature would surely boil it, right? Maybe not.

Apparently, so goes the theory, you can heat the egg long enough to kill the bacteria and it still won't be cooked. Since a lot of recipes call for 'raw' eggs, this should be a great way to avoid the wicked salmonella that keeps popping up in everything these days.

You can even pasteurize your own eggs yourself! Recipezaar has the method on their site.

There are a lot of entries in Google about pasteurized eggs. Most of them are asking questions about them.  But I did find several interesting articles about milk and shell eggs with extended shelf lives.

This article, ULTRAPASTEURIZED & PASTEURIZED FOOD, on Chemical & Engineering News was really the most informative and makes more sense than most.

I buy ultrapasteurized milk. It is also organic and rather pricey, but since the regular milk goes bad long before I use it all and has to be thrown away, I think it is cost effective. But I have never seen pasteurized eggs for sale in any of my local markets. I think it is a good idea though, and maybe they will eventually sell those 'safer' eggs.

Have you ever bought pasteurized eggs?