Very informative article. I was expecting the author to finish off on an "Americans are weird and people shouldn't have to worry about refrigerating their eggs" but, instead, he showed why its valid for us to be doing so.
Nah, you really don't need to refrigerate eggs. They'll last for months without refrigeration.
But if you do that, I guess it's prudent to cook them. (BTW salmonella from home use of eggs is rare. It usually happens in restaurants where they mix a bunch of eggs together.)
I'd be interested in knowing how much alcohol you'd have to put in uncooked eggnog to render it safe. The recipe in The Joy of Cooking suggests 4 to 6 cups (a liter to a liter and a half) for 18 servings. That seems like rather a lot from a drinking standpoint, but maybe not that much from a sanitizing standpoint considering that there's also 2 cups (half a liter) of heavy cream and a pound (half a kilo) of sugar.
Thank you for the light bulb moment. Joy says to do exactly this "to dispel the eggy taste". I suppose that's more appealing than "to kill any bacteria that might make you ill".
For eggnog and other recipes that necessitate raw eggs, one can always use pasteurized eggs. It is easy to DIY if you have an immersion circulator. If not, some stores sell them now.
Alarmingly enough, that's a liter of /liquor/ the recipe calls for. Ars picked up on the importance of mixing the eggs with it first to have a high concentration of alcohol for sanitation before adding the other stuff.
Not as many people cook with a thermometer as should... the big problem is egg whites start to coagulate around 65 or so. Your fried egg is not safe unless its frankly somewhat overcooked. If its runny, you're totally rolling the dice. I do not eat eggs, especially at restaurants, I'm tired of food poisoning (which hardly happens every time, or even occasionally, but since fried eggs are greasy and rubbery and gross and the only thing worse than fried eggs is food poisoning symptoms, I don't mind not eating them anymore). In baked goods I don't mind even though unrisen cookie dough is full of raw egg.
Its too bad because from a technical standpoint I think sous vide "hard boiled" eggs would be very interesting, but not interesting enough to risk food poisoning.
Kinda cool, learned something about eggs today.