This 5-Minute Easy Edible Cookie Dough Is Safe to Eat Raw—and It's Delicious

Who among us hasn’t been tempted to sneak a spoonful of homemade or store-bought chocolate chip cookie dough batter? As enticing as that bowl (or tube) of raw cookie dough may look, it's really not a good idea to dig in—both the raw eggs and uncooked flour in traditional cookie dough carry risks of foodborne illness, including Salmonella and listeria. Fortunately, there's a way to satiate a bout of childhood nostalgia for raw cookie dough—without succumbing to a bout of food poisoning. 

This recipe for a delicious—and safe—dough studded with chocolate chips comes together in five minutes from just a handful of ingredients you probably already have in your pantry. It makes enough for one or two servings, so you can share it with a friend or keep it all for yourself—I won’t judge.

How to Make Raw Cookie Dough Safe to Eat

Making raw cookie dough safe to eat requires more than just nixing the raw eggs: Raw flour is technically unsafe to eat, according to the CDC. Flour doesn't look like a raw food, but most all-purpose flour is raw. That means it hasn't been treated to kill pathogens that cause food poisoning, such as Escherichia coli (E. coli) and Salmonella. These harmful bacteria can contaminate the grain while it's still in the field or flour while it's being made. Steps like grinding grain and bleaching flour don't kill the harmful germs—and there is a chance that pathogens can end up in flour or baking mixes you buy at the store. 

These bacteria are killed once they reach 160℉, so baking or cooking with flour makes it safe to consume. Fortunately it's easy to make unbaked flour safe, and it takes less than a minute: Briefly zap the flour on a heat-saft plate in the microwave to ensure the flour reaches at least 160℉. This brief cooking is sufficient to kill any harmful bacteria that might be present in the flour. The short time in the microwave also cooks off the raw flour flavor, resulting in a more deeply flavored, much better tasting dough.

The Best Substitute for the Raw Egg

One of the key ingredients in standard chocolate chip cookies is egg. While sugar and flour are the stars in most traditional cookie dough recipes, eggs are the workhorse— they show up to get the job done by providing plenty of water to hydrate the dough, lecithin (a powerful emulsifier) to bind the batter, fat to enrich the dough, and protein to ensure the cookies retain their structure once baked.

So when omitting eggs from a raw batter, ingredient adjustments are needed to ensure the batter is still as rich and moist as a cookie dough that’s made with eggs. The first adjustment is scaling up the amount of butter in the recipe to make up for the fat lost from the missing egg yolk. This cookie dough has almost equal parts by weight of flour to butter (32g to 28g), which is a much higher percentage of butter than most traditional cookie recipes. This guarantees you won’t miss the richness from eggs.

The second recipe adjustment is adding milk to the batter. Milk is not a standard chocolate chip cookie ingredient, but a couple of tablespoons of milk in this recipe makes up for moisture lost from the missing egg. This ensures that the flour in the dough is well hydrated and that the dough doesn’t have a sandy, dry texture. I add the milk to the dough after the sugar is whisked and fully dissolved in the warm butter. 

Customize the Dough However You Like

The main recipe below is for a basic chocolate chip cookie dough. I use brown sugar instead of granulated sugar for a richer, deeper toffee-like flavor, and a scant amount of salt livens the flavor of the batter.  But view this recipe as a starting point and be as creative as you choose—you could add a few tablespoons of chopped nuts, crushed salty pretzels, or your favorite sugary cereal in addition to or in place of the chocolate chips, just to list a few options. I’ve also provided three fun flavor variations below the recipe: a funfetti cookie dough, a double chocolate cookie dough, and a peanut butter cookie dough, which are all equally good.

Drape a blanket over my shoulders, place a messy bun on top of my head, and put a spoonful of any one of these raw cookie doughs in my hand, and I’m in my happy place.