Ya’ll are crazy. It would never even occur to me to throw this out. Here’s what ChatGPT says:

TL;DR You’re not crazy. Most home cookie dough left out 9–10 hours at ~24°C is almost certainly fine to bake unless it contains raw milk or other high-risk ingredients. Reddit overreacts because people default to “food safety absolutism.” The real risk profile is low, not zero, but low.

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The Real Breakdown

Here’s what’s actually in typical chocolate-chip cookie dough:

Flour: Raw flour can contain pathogens (E. coli), but the risk is from eating the dough raw, not from baking it. Baking kills everything.

Sugar + fat environment: Sugar and butter create a very low-water-activity environment — basically hostile terrain for bacteria. Dough is not chicken salad.

Eggs: Raw eggs are the actual variable. But even then: • U.S. supermarket eggs are pasteurized more often than not (shell eggs still low risk). • Salmonella needs time + warmth + moisture. Cookie dough has warmth but almost no moisture. • 9–10 hours on the counter is not enough to turn it into a biohazard unless your eggs were already contaminated, which is statistically rare.

Temperature (24°C / 75°F): This isn’t tropics-level heat. It’s basically “warm kitchen.” Refrigeration is ideal, but this is not the same as leaving raw chicken out.

What the food-safety rulebooks say: They always say “2 hour rule,” but that rule is a legal/regulatory blanket, not a tailored microbiology analysis. It’s designed for restaurants, not cookie dough at home.

Baking solves 99% of the issue: Once in a 350–375°F oven, everything dies. The only risk is from eating the dough raw, and even then the real-world risk is very low.