Pizookie: Cookie-Ice Cream Treat

Cookie and ice cream lovers can have both with pizookie, a delectable dessert of hybrid cookie dough served fresh-from-the-oven, topped with ice cream.

Pizookie is actually a combo of several cookie dough in flavors like chocolate chips, white chocolate macadamia, salted caramel, s’mores, peanut butter and more, baked and served in a deep dish, then topped with scoops of one’s choice of ice cream.

If you are looking to try one for the first time, this glutinous dessert is a bestseller at BJ’s chain of restaurants; particularly the peanut butter, salted caramel and s’mores cookie dough combination.

When concocting one at home, it is best to use the premade cookie doughs. Not only because they already come in different flavors; but also because they are safer to eat and can be eaten raw. Although recipes for cookie dough call for simple ingredients like flour, eggs, butter, white sugar, salt and vanilla extract, those ingredients need to be preheated, especially if intended to be eaten as raw dough.

What are Preheated Cookie Doughs?

Preheating processes make a dough mixture less susceptible to bacterial contamination. Most manufacturers of commeircial premade cookie doughs apply preheating processes to their basic ingredients. The flour undergoes heat treatment, while the eggs go through pasteurization processes. Manufacturers do so to eliminate pathogens known to cause gastrointestinal problems. Premade cookie dough products even if kept in freezers, have to have a shelf-life.

The importance of preheating processes had been proven in the case of Nestle, which started applying the heating and pasteurization processeses only in 2010. In 2009, 77 people in 30 states were downed by dysentery by eating food contaminated with the Shiga pathogen, an E.coli bacterium .The source of the Shiga contamination was later traced to have come from Nestle’s premade cookie dough, which at that time did not go through heating and pasteurization processes.

As additional precaution, do not let cookie doughs that have been taken out of the freezer stay at room temperature for more than two hours; especially if the premade product is already near or past its “Best Before Date.”