Flour contaminated by raw pork juices

Flour contaminated by raw pork juices - Woman making pastry on table with flour

The pack of pork I bought was leaky, and some of the juices soaked into a pack of flour. I'm wondering whether the flour is still safe to cook with.

What I'm thinking:

  1. The flour will be baked before eating, thus killing any bacteria.

  2. Flour is dry, not a suitable environment for the bacteria, they will be dead before I even use the flour in a week or two.

On the other hand, I don't want to get sick over a 1€ pack of flour. Should I throw it away, or is it safe to consume?



Best Answer

Throw it away, it's not worth risking health issues over such a cheap staple. While the flour was originally dry, the pork juice introduced moisture into it, providing a much better breeding ground for bacteria.

Your concern should not be (just) the bacteria, but also the much hardier toxins that they produce--those could easily give you food poisoning, and normal cooking times and temperatures are very unlikely to adequately destroy them.




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Can you get cross-contamination from pork?

Stochastic simulation found a high risk of cross-contamination from raw to cooked pork when the same hands, knives and cutting boards were used for handling raw and cooked pork (78%); when the same cutting board but a different knife was used, cross-contamination was still high (67%).

What happens if you eat pork raw?

Eating raw or undercooked pork is not a good idea. The meat can harbor parasites, like roundworms or tapeworms. These can cause foodborne illnesses like trichinosis or taeniasis. While rare, trichinosis can lead to serious complications that are sometimes fatal.

How likely are you to get sick from undercooked pork?

So developing trichinosis from eating undercooked pork is not impossible in the United States, but the overall risk is an order of magnitude less than one in a million.

Is raw pork safe?

Both uncooked or raw pork and undercooked pork are unsafe to eat. Meat sometimes has bacteria and parasites that can make you sick.



Natural Ways To Get Rid Of Intestinal Worms In No Time




More answers regarding flour contaminated by raw pork juices

Answer 2

But the flour is not dry if it has pork juice. Pork juice is only good for 4 hours at room temperature.

If only a small part is damp MAYBE you could just throw that out. You are still taking a risk.

The safe bet is to just throw it out. If it is only slight damp at one end or the other immediately when I got home I would open from the other end, pour out half, and discard the bag. You don't want to pour out the contaminated end as then the salvage flour would pass the contaminated bag. I am not recommending you do that. Just what I would do.

The store should not have put the pork in the same bag as the flour and for sure not on top.

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