Oh. You find it all especially bad? Stilton is especially bad? Wensleydale? What about Cheddar? Are you sure you meant to state it so strongly as that?
I believe that’s how they make processed cheese such as kraft singles and ‘cheese food’ portions, which I would agree are especially bad.
You can get any of those cheeses made with raw, unpasteurized milk.
Yep, seriously. Del Charro, at the Inn of the Governors. I thought my buddy was joking about it, too, until we ate there together.
Which restaurant is this, Santo Rugger? I’ve been to at least two restaurants here where I can get a rare burger, and I’ve yet to be asked to sign anything.
ETA: No, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to sign anything to get a rare burger there. I haven’t signed anything, that’s for sure. So either I didn’t have to, or I ordered “Medium rare, far to the rare side.”
Shouldn’t be a problem if the water’s boiling.
A pasteurized egg would not change the dressing enough to warrant stripping it of it’s status as a Caesar salad. I defy you to tell the difference in a blind tasting.
Risk is not a necessary component of a properly made Caesar salad.
Not sure you can get Stilton made from unpasteurised milk - it’s part of the tightly-controlled spec.
But that’s beside the point really - which is my surprise over the term ‘especially bad’. I can understand and appreciate that raw milk does make a difference, but surely it’s not so vast a difference as to warrant so strong a negative. If you’d said Cheez Whiz was especially bad, I’d have batted nary an eye, but IMO, there are a lot of quite good cheeses are made from pasteurised milk. The dismissal of them all in this way seems more like elitism than aesthetics, to me.
It depends what you mean by Stilton. Legally it cannot be called Stilton, but the original way of making Stilton used raw milk.
It is a matter of of personal taste. I think it is especially bad as opposed to milk or cream.
The milk for cheese is pasteurized. Don’t confuse pasteurized with processed. Some raw milk cheese has been showing up in California in the immigrant areas infected with bovine tuberculoses. It is passed on to the people that eat it.
It isn’t. Claiming that cheese made with pasteurized milk is “especially bad” is absolutely absurd, and wouldn’t be done by anyone who knows anything at all on the subject. Most people who know nothing on the subject have probably only had cheese made from pasteurized milk, and so wouldn’t know the difference anyway. In short, it’s one of the weirder things I’ve heard someone say on the topic.
That isn’t to say that many cheeses made from raw milk don’t taste different and/or better, but I’ve never heard anyone say the alternative is “bad”. It’s like saying that a piece of prime beef that has only been aged for 10 days instead of 14 is “especially bad”.
Lots of raw milk cheese is made in the US, but it has to be aged for a minimum of 60 days.
Raw eggs served directly from the shell aren’t necessarily salmonella-laden death pods. If you have a weak immune system, then the tiny, little bit of salmonella that might be there could cause you problems. The real risk is commercial-quantity applications. Say… you crack open 300 eggs, and use them over the course of a couple of hours, some in raw applications. That gives the tiny, little bit of salmonella to become something quite significant.
Moving to Cafe Society from GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
All this time I’ve been enjoying faux Caesar Salads. I had no idea the real thing contained coddled eggs.
This is pretty much my take on the whole thing. I like cheese a lot - and I’ve eaten a fair bit of cheese made with raw milk - so I understand the differences it can make - and I understand it’s a matter of opinion, preference and personal taste, etc.
I’m just boggled by the idea that someone could find the contrast so severe as to warrant so sweepingly negative a label.
Presented with a platter consisting of ten unspecified raw milk cheeses and ten unspecified, different* cheeses made from pasteurised milk, I very much doubt that anyone would be able to perfectly sort them one from the other.
*I concede that many people would reliably discern the difference between raw and pasteurised versions of the same type of cheese, presented together - what I don’t think would be possible is to discern, given random pieces of unfamiliar cheese, which category they belong to. And yet, if one entire category is ‘especially bad’, that would be an easy task.
I brought this stat up the last time raw eggs in caesar were mentioned: only roughly 1 in 20000 eggs in the US are tainted. That’s pretty good odds that I’d be willing to take as a diner.
Note that the stat I mentioned is strictly US, the contamination rate for eggs varies widely even in developed countries (as I recall Ireland was roughly 1 in 3, for example) so if you’re not in the US you’ll want to check with your local agricultural regulators before cracking an egg into your salad.
I didn’t mean to kill this thread with my largely semantic cheese hijack. Let’s see if I can revive it by saying:
Nothing in life is absolutely risk-free, but I can completely understand that restaurants cannot court the odds - they really have no choice but to eliminate any and every risk they possibly can.
That said, it’s a shame there does not exist some legal mechanism whereby the diner can explicitly accept a certain category of risk as inherent in the activity of eating his raw egg, rare hamburger or whatever. Or does such a thing exist and I just don’t know about it?
I’m willing to buy that cheese made with raw milk is tastier from a cheese-connoisseur perspective. But I would be really surprised if someone could tell if a Caesar salad dressing is made from a pasteurized egg.
I use pasteurized eggs frequently. They are pasteurized in the shell, this isn’t some “egg product” in a carton. When raw, they differ very slightly from regular eggs in texture, but I don’t notice any difference at all in their taste or texture when cooked. The pasteurized egg might be just one iota closer to coddled when raw. I can’t see going to the trouble of introducing paperwork to the salad process rather than using pasteurized eggs.