Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

you can get sick from commercial peanut butter, jack-in-the-box hamburgers and packaged spinach.
it's possible to get sick from any food product, including carbonara. but are the chances high? not really. if we really worried about all the ways we could get sick we wouldn't be able to eat anything. enjoy the pasta and don't worry!

As a carbonara afficionado, I've studied (prepared) this dish a grillion times, and no one has ever gotten sick from egg rawness. I don't have a food blog, but I've done a few posts on my favorite foods, and this is what I say about the eggs-rawness questions:

"The egg will cook, I promise. The water is boiling at 200+ degrees, and the pasta is well above 160 degrees (the federally recommended temperature for cooking "egg dishes"). You're taking a single yolk, breaking it up, and mixing it with boiling water and strands of piping hot noodles, it's going to cook! Also, this is why you use tongs to take the spaghetti out of the water - so you reserve some of that delicious boiling water."

http://bridgegirdermetronome.blogspot.com/2008/09/stories-are-all-true.html

In theory, you could wait so long after draining the pasta that it simply doesn't cook the egg at all, but I just don't buy it.

Jamie Oliver makes "zucchini carbonara" by mixing cooked pasta into the saute pan and waiting for the sizzle to quiet down, then he adds the egg mixture. Not a bad trick, but I've always found that the saute pan is too hot and will scramble the eggs.

I could talk about carbonara all day. I wish that were my job.

If you are worried about it, do what I do. Any preperation that calls for raw or even slightly undercooked eggs, I use pasterized. They are pricier, but if your imune system is already working over time, or your just concerned, they are well worth the piece of mind.

You can definitely get sick from raw or undercooked eggs. This is why you see disclaimers on any menu that offers carbonara or tiramisu or anything else where the eggs are not cooked.

Your own personal tolerance is another story. If you can handle a few bites of carbonara without any ill effects, you can probably do an order of it. However, if you have a compromised immune system or a chronic digestive condition, I'd pass on carbonara and dishes of its ilk.

My mother and I split a Caesar salad in a restaurant and ended up in the emergency room a few days later from salmonella (we were tested and it was confirmed). We were both seriously dehydrated and needed shots to help with the other symptoms. I was out sick from work for almost two weeks and my mother for almost three. One of the doctors who treated me told me he sees enough cases of salmonella to convince him to never eat anything prepared with raw eggs.

Since then, not only do I never mess with anything resembling a raw egg, even though I used to adore carbonara (as well as tiramasu, Caesar salads) and would cook and eat it frequently, and I advise anyone to stay away from anything that might possibly be prepared with raw eggs as well.

I'm in the "you can get sick from anything" camp. You can choose to live in a bubble, or you can choose to take reasonable risks, or you can choose to jump out of airplanes.

You can also get killed by a piece of falling sky debris while sitting in your bubble.

When I was growing up, every kid looked forward to scraping out the mixing bowl after mom made cake batter. Which had raw eggs. Sunnyside-up eggs were common.

I read somewhere (sorry, no idea where) that the chance of salmonella on the outside of an egg is 1 in 80,000. Inside, there's less chance. You'd have to eat a lot of raw eggs before you won that lottery.

Cross-contamination is a real thing, and so is common sense. You don't want to be stupid about food prep.

If your immune system is weak or you're a little skittish about raw eggs, or if you're serving other people who might have issues, buy pasturized eggs.

My husband is immunosuppressed and we had to modify our carbonara per doctors orders. We use the egg beaters w/ yolk as it is out of shell and is pasteurized. It is a slightly less creamy effect but is definitely worthwhile if you are compromised.

All that said, unless you do have a weakened immune system I think you would be alright as we made it many many times before he was ordered not to when he was transplanted.

@huneybumber: open discussions contain opinions and facts and yes sometimes one may feel attacked but thats a part of all this love baby! If we all just sat around and thought up silly ways to transform classic dishes into plastic molds we would not have a very interesting blog now...would we? Whats the weather like inside that bubble?

@huney, I hope you didn't see my answer as being chastising. I don't equate asking a question about safety (which is what the OP did) to living in a bubble. The people living in a bubble are the ones who will never eat any nut products ever again because of the recent recalls.

Reasonable people will take reasonable precautions, and what's reasonable for one person may be extreme for another. The "jumping out of airplanes" people are the ones who eat fugu. Which is fine, if they have the proper parachute.

Actually, I don't think any of the choices are wrong. They're just personal choices. If someone wants to be super-diligent about what they eat, it's not my concern. But no one's going to live forever, no matter how careful.

The amount of risk that's reasonable to take in order to enjoy a particular food is a personal one, and everyone draws a line somewhere. Just look at topics where someone mentions that they've had something in the fridge for a while and half the responses will be to eat it and the other half will be that it should be thrown out, now, or risk horrible consequences.

Honestly, I am more squeamish about raw eggs now than I used to be, even though I know that the statistics show that eggs are relatively safe. But the hype and the chatter about the dangers of raw eggs have seeped into my brain.

However, raw cake batter and cookie dough, in my mind, are still perfectly safe. I never think twice about sneaking a taste.

@huney. Okay, then. I don't always know if something I've written has come across the way I want it to.

I'm with Huney on this one, I don't see why asking this question implies the person needs to "grow up". This isn't a forum to ridicule others. Is it?