Spaniards with a taste for oozing, fleetingly cooked tortilla de patatas have been urged to take care after more than 100 people fell ill with suspected salmonella poisoning from eating the famous egg and potato omelettes at a well-known restaurant in Madrid.
There have been 101 people who have become ill, 13 of whom had to receive hospital treatment after eating at Casa Dani, a longstanding gastronomic institution in the Spanish capital.
At the end of January, Casa Dani, serving up to 700 tortillas a day, apologised for what had happened and said it would close its doors until an investigation by the regional health authorities had concluded.
Mar a del Toro, researcher at the La Rioja Centre for Biomedical Research in northern Spain, urged people to be careful when eating eggs in restaurants and when preparing them at home.
We all like a runny tortilla but it's especially risky if it's going to be eaten by kids, by immunocompromised people, by pregnant women, or by older people, Del Toro told the COPE radio station this week.
We need to be careful when we cook food, because we need to be careful when we cook tortillas because they are made with eggs but also when we cook poultry, like turkey of chicken, because they can also be contaminated with salmonella. Del Toro said in a tweet on Sunday that they were playing the wheel of fortune with salmonella, and that they were more emphatic. Spain recently updated a 30 year old food hygiene law that stipulated that fresh eggs had to be cooked at a temperature of at least 75 C 167 F Under the new rules, which came into effect last December, eggs must be cooked at a temperature of at least 70 C for two seconds or at a temperature of at least 63 C for 20 seconds. The Madrid regional government advises fans of oozy omelettes to use pasteurised, rather than fresh, eggs in fried eggs, tortillas or other egg dishes.
It reminds people to take extra care during the hot summer months.
There are more tortilla poisonings during the summer and the hotter months, according to the advice on its website. This happens because raw eggs are used, the centre of the tortilla doesn't set, and the tortilla is kept at room temperature for more than two hours before being eaten. Such practices favor the growth of a bacteria called salmonella. Runny versus well set is not the only constant debate among tortilla aficionados. Even though a groundbreaking El Mundo poll found that 72.7% of those surveyed favoured onion, 25.3% were against, while a non-committal 1.9% didn't answer, the squabbles over whether or not onion belongs in a tortilla de patata continue with tedious regularity.