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Food Safety
Boiling Omelets or Scrambled Eggs In
Bags
The following “new” method for quickly cooking omelets frequently surfaces in e-mail messages. You put the egg mixture for each omelet in a separate food-storage bag, and let each of your guests add their choice of filling ingredients and seal the bags. Mark their names on the bags with indelible ink and then simply put the bags in boiling water. Voila! In almost no time, you have omelets for a group, as many as 14. It’s great! On the surface, this does sound like a great idea. However, it is NOT safe to boil the food-storage bags that are widely available in supermarkets. None of the major manufacturers of either food-storage bags or baking bags recommend that any of their bags be used in boiling water. The temperature of boiling water (212 F.) is too close to the melting temperature of the plastic used for the bags. Even if the bags don’t actually melt, the concern of the bag manufacturers is that the high heat of boiling may cause unwanted chemicals from the plastic to diffuse into the food. There are some vacuum heat-sealing machines on the market that are used with heavy-duty, freezer-quality bags that are meant to be boiled. However, these very sturdy bags can only be sealed with the appliance and are seldom available at supermarkets. To use the recipe, you would have to buy both the sealing appliance ($50 and up) and a roll of fairly expensive bags. This is impractical for home cooks unless they intend to use the appliance for other recipes. Because microwave oven cooking also generates fairly high heat, food professionals also don’t recommend using either food-storage bags or Styrofoam cups in the microwave oven. Similarly, because they’re made for only one freezing-and-cooking cycle, manufacturers of ready-to-heat frozen entrees don’t recommend re-using the plastic trays in which the food is frozen and cooked. When promoting recipes, it’s best to recommend only those, which call for the food to be prepared in materials that are clearly intended for cooking, baking and/or microwave oven cooking. Source: American Egg Board NEBRASKA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE [an error occurred while processing this directive] |
