How Is Ice Cream Cookie Dough Different From Regular Cookie Dough?

It's a thought that's occurred to most of us while eating ice cream studded with chunks of cookie dough: It looks like cookie dough, it tastes like cookie dough, but is it real cookie dough? If you bake it, will it result in real cookies? And if it is actual cookie dough, shouldn't the eggs in it be potentially poisonous?

So here's the deal: The folks at Huffington Post recently went out and bought a handful of varieties of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream, removed the dough, formed it into cookies, and baked them off. The resulting product absolutely resembled real chocolate chip cookies, believe it or not, and while they were a bit dry and sweet, and not necessarily good chocolate chip cookies, they were definitely cookies.

Which begs the question: what exactly are those "dough" chunks made out of? There actually aren't that many differences between regular cookie dough and ice cream cookie dough. Ice cream cookie dough tends to contain no leavening (it's unnecessary if you're eating the dough straight), the flour is given a heat treatment to make it safe to eat straight, and the eggs are, of course, pasteurized. Chemicals are also added in order to prevent the cookie dough chunks from sticking to the ice cream-making machinery and disintegrating in the ice cream.

So there you have it: For all intents and purposes, the cookie dough in ice cream is actual cookie dough!