Can You Eat Cookie Dough?

It’s difficult to come to terms with, but unfortunately, despite whatever social media challenges are out there, eating uncooked cookie dough is just not healthy. It’s a proven fact, not just something Mom made up so you wouldn’t eat the whole batch of cookies before it made it to the oven. 

Seeing that Cheryl’s Cookies shares your love for the taste and texture of raw cookie dough (as well as the desire to not end up sick in bed because of it), the company decided to take matters into its own hands and engineer a cookie dough made specifically to be enjoyed in its uncooked state. 

To get the entire scoop on this unique custom dessert, as well as learn more about why the raw stuff should be avoided, we consulted Jacquelyn Blanchard, a food scientist at Cheryl’s Cookies and the lead developer on the brand’s Ready-to-Eat bakeable cookie dough. This major munchie achievement is a long-awaited victory for tastebuds of all ages. So, grab your favorite milk and your kitchen’s biggest spoon, and let’s dig right in! 

The raw cookie dough risk

What’s wrong with eating raw cookie dough? The answer is actually pretty simple: Uncooked cookie dough contains unpasteurized eggs and raw flour as ingredients, which can be contaminated with E. coli and salmonella, so eating it can lead to food poisoning. The only way to eliminate this risk, Blanchard points out, is to bake standard cookie dough at a high temperature. Once the cookies’ internal temperature reaches 160 degrees Fahrenheit, all is well. But until then, it’s hands off. 

The special recipe

Cheryl’s Cookies’ Ready-to-Eat dough contains no eggs and includes flour that has been pre-treated with heat, a process that kills any potential bacteria that may be lurking. But these recipe tweaks won’t keep you from cooking it, if you so choose. The egg substitute, corn starch, acts as a perfect replacement that ensures the dough rises and congeals in the oven while preserving that traditional baked cookie taste and mouthfeel.

The consistency of Cheryl’s Ready-to-Eat cookie dough differs from that of standard cookie dough as well. “This product has a smoother texture than other bakeable doughs, making it easier to scoop out of containers,” Blanchard notes. “It was designed to be consumed straight out of the tub.”

This adjustment also makes it highly spreadable, and ensures bits of it don’t go flying everywhere when you dig in. Wait, spreadable cookie dough? Imagine the possibilities: cookie dough and jelly sandwich, cookie dough toast, even cookie dough as a condiment in your cereal!

The development process

The three flavors of Ready-to-Eat cookie dough (Chocolate Chip, Peanut Butter Truffle, Celebration Chip Sugar Cookie) took Blanchard and her team of food scientists just one month to perfect. 

The first real challenge was figuring out how to keep the cookie dough kitchen-fresh until it hits your spoon. “It took us 60 days to complete shipping tests and determine the proper packaging to use for delivering the product to customers,” Blanchard explains. The resulting container and box preserved that just-mixed flavor, without any need for expensive dry ice shipping.

The final, and most complex step, was identifying how long Ready-to-Eat cookie dough could be kept consumable at top taste. “Shelf life testing was completed over the course of 10 months to determine the ambient, refrigerated, and frozen shelf life of the dough,” Blanchard reports. 

Thanks to Blanchard and her team, the Ready-to-Eat cookie dough now stays fresh much longer than standard dough does — once opened, it lasts for 60 days in the refrigerator versus only two to four days in the fridge.

Going beyond the tub

Though eating dough straight from the tub or adding it to ice cream to create new cookie dough ice cream flavors are our go-tos, Blanchard has her favorite methods of enjoyment. “Bake it to make cookies that can be used to scoop more dough out of the tub. Freeze dough balls and dip them in chocolate for a poppable cold snack. In fact, dipping the chocolate peanut butter truffle flavor is a great new take on the classic buckeye!”

The love of raw cookie dough spans generations, and we suspect it has a lot to do with nostalgia: baking with family, sharing in the prep process, finally being given permission to lick the spoon or bowl once the dough hits the oven. It’s one of life’s ultimate comfort foods, and we’re just as excited as you are that someone has finally figured out how it can be eaten safely…and in large quantities, too!