The primary reason for the increased risk vs. a home cooked egg has to do with volume.
Processing plants make things in HUGE batches. This includes cookie dough. If there are a small number of eggs containing salmonella and they’re mixed in with hundreds of others, then you’ve got a huge contaminated batch which is used to make all the thousands of smaller units for sale to consumers.
See the problem there?
However, apparently there are some companies who make cookie dough for consumption raw because people like it so much. They use eggs which have been either cooked or irradiated to eliminate the Salmonella risk.
But if you try to use that stuff to bake cookies they’ll turn out hard and flat because its the uncooked eggs which give tenderness and rise to cookies as they bake.
So, you can have this stuff if you really like eating raw cookie dough. You just can’t bake with it :)
Oh, and if you make your cookies from scratch rather than buying the premade cookie dough, that lessens the risk considerably.
And if you want to eliminate the risk altogether, you can now buy eggs which are Salmonella free at the market. I believe they’re irradiated or pasteurized. So, if you make your cookies from those eggs, you can sneak some if it raw.
.
.
http://www.safeeggs.com/eggs/salmonella-eggs
.
,,,