What to do with the ends of a dry aged subprimal

ChillyWillis

So I just finished dry aging my first rib eye subprimal. A few of these bad boys are heading straight for a bath with my new sous vide. Can't wait!  One question though, is there anything that I can use the two ends of the subprimal for? I'm guessing they wouldn't make good steaks because the crust would be covering an entire side, but is there another use for them? It feels like a heck of a waste to just chuck them. Maybe grind up for burgers?

Any advice from you more experienced dry agree would be much appreciated!

Darby_Crenshaw

carpaccio

this was off one aged 100 days.

i took off the heels, and slivered out some thin slices. eat it raw.  salt, pepper, drizzle of olive oil, maybe lemon



for the hard bits, i chop them up and use them as dog treats.

remember, it's all edible.  the dried stuff is just jerky

(just noticed this was ten days short of five years ago. time flies)

Ozzie_Isaac

@Darby_Crenshaw why does that not kill you?  Dry aged as in no cure.  What kills the dangerous stuff?

Btw, I love all manner of cured meats,  just never thought to make them myself.

johnnyp

Ozzie_Isaac said:

@Darby_Crenshaw why does that not kill you? 

I'd love to know the science myself

epcotisbest

ChillyWillis said:

So I just finished dry aging my first rib eye subprimal. A few of these bad boys are heading straight for a bath with my new sous vide. Can't wait!  One question though, is there anything that I can use the two ends of the subprimal for? I'm guessing they wouldn't make good steaks because the crust would be covering an entire side, but is there another use for them? It feels like a heck of a waste to just chuck them. Maybe grind up for burgers?

Any advice from you more experienced dry agree would be much appreciated!

You could FedEx the ends my way for experimentation, but I would need one of the middle steaks to compare them to. I will be sure to describe the results in detail. Always happy to help!

theyolksonyou

Unfortunately, there's an approximate 5 yr lag. Darby has left us....

ChillyWillis

@RRP I know you have a boatload of knowledge on the subject of dry aging. What would you recommend for this?

nolaegghead

Ozzie_Isaac said:

@Darby_Crenshaw why does that not kill you?  Dry aged as in no cure.  What kills the dangerous stuff?

Btw, I love all manner of cured meats,  just never thought to make them myself.

Dehydration is a preservation method.  Most bacteria is on the outside, which dehydrates.  With dry aging, the bacteria is there, just arrested in reproduction.  When you cook it, the outside cooks, kills stuff.  Inside is yummy, eat it.

Your stomach has acid in it that kills bacteria.  Not to say there's some bad stuff floating around, the worst is very rare, but people are overtly paranoid about it.

Food safety advocates and the FDA have draconian rules about cooking meat - cook all beef to 160F, etc.  Rules to protect everyone - the bubble baby on Seinfeld, the old mother-in-law, the infant, the immune compromised.

In my opinion, which doesn't matter to anyone but me but I will voice - your immune system is like a muscle.  Anecdotal story - buddy of mine was on a sub in the navy, after a few years in a sterile environment, his immune system was weakened and he came out of the service with allergies.  And other problems.  He blamed it on the sterility.  Who knows.  Kids that eat dirt, people that are subjected to intestinal parasites, folks that munch on biologically active stuff build up their immune system.

I'm not saying there is less risk building up the immune system versus cooking the crap out of all your food, but a probiotic diet can make your immune system stronger, as it is exercised by real-life bugs. 

As they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  There is truth in that.  Or it will kill you (highly unlikely).  More likely - and very rare - some seat time on the porcelain throne.)

Me - I weigh my risk. Don't eat rare bear meat.  I go for taste.  Don't buy processed vegetables if you're a paranoid M-effer.  More processing = more potential to chow down on a farm worker's morning grumpy.

Darby_Crenshaw

@Ozzie_Isaac Not being a wiseacre heee, just flipping the question (and acknowledging the nola touched on everything pretty much anyway, and people tend to hate long indepth thorough answer): what makes you think your food will kill you, abd what 'bad things' are *in* your food?

further, what magic is a high end restaurant doing to their meat which comforts a buyer when they spend $75 for a dry aged porterhouse, but causes them to panic when they find a steak in their fridge one day past the sell by date?

these are questions which have been asked and answered dozens of times here, but which never 'stick'.  It seems the askers go away with a bunch of more questions or uncertainties rather than answers

in shirt though:

-there are no such things as 'baddies'. Or 'bad stuff'. You can't understand an enemy you don't know. We're talking potentially fecal bacteria, due to spilled intestine contents during slaughter. These could get ON the meat. Not in. It's not a case of "baddies" in the meat. 

-where is this bacteria, if it is there (and there's a good chance it is)? On the exterior.

-So, rinse the meat. Some hard core types use hydrogen peroxide.  No need to though. Why? If it dries, it dies.

-further, put it in your fridge. keep the meat cold and bacterial growth slows to near zero. The drying AND cold limit growth 

-and since the inside is free of bacteria (whole muscle only, NOT sausage), what unnamed "baddies" are we concerned about?

-some will say: "b-b-but they use ultraviolet lights and humidity controls in restaurants!"  Yep. They do.  ut it is a question of QUALITY, not safety. yes, ultraviolet lights provide safety againsy microbial growth. But it is belt AND suspenders. They are doing this in a large environment with a lot of meat rotating in and out over periods of years. They are warding off strains of cultivated bacteria in a way. As for humidity control... They add humidity to limit drying. My 100day steaks are too dry. They were left in the dridge after chunkong off a roast. I prefer 45 days

-For us, cold is enough. And our fridges are essentially dehydrators unfortunately. Which means they dry quickly and well. So surface bacteria don't stand much of a chance

fishlessman

nolaegghead said:

Ozzie_Isaac said:

@Darby_Crenshaw why does that not kill you?  Dry aged as in no cure.  What kills the dangerous stuff?

Btw, I love all manner of cured meats,  just never thought to make them myself.

Dehydration is a preservation method.  Most bacteria is on the outside, which dehydrates.  With dry aging, the bacteria is there, just arrested in reproduction.  When you cook it, the outside cooks, kills stuff.  Inside is yummy, eat it.

Your stomach has acid in it that kills bacteria.  Not to say there's some bad stuff floating around, the worst is very rare, but people are overtly paranoid about it.

Food safety advocates and the FDA have draconian rules about cooking meat - cook all beef to 160F, etc.  Rules to protect everyone - the bubble baby on Seinfeld, the old mother-in-law, the infant, the immune compromised.

In my opinion, which doesn't matter to anyone but me but I will voice - your immune system is like a muscle.  Anecdotal story - buddy of mine was on a sub in the navy, after a few years in a sterile environment, his immune system was weakened and he came out of the service with allergies.  And other problems.  He blamed it on the sterility.  Who knows.  Kids that eat dirt, people that are subjected to intestinal parasites, folks that munch on biologically active stuff build up their immune system.

I'm not saying there is less risk building up the immune system versus cooking the crap out of all your food, but a probiotic diet can make your immune system stronger, as it is exercised by real-life bugs. 

As they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.  There is truth in that.  Or it will kill you (highly unlikely).  More likely - and very rare - some seat time on the porcelain throne.)

Me - I weigh my risk. Don't eat rare bear meat.  I go for taste.  Don't buy processed vegetables if you're a paranoid M-effer.  More processing = more potential to chow down on a farm worker's morning grumpy.

tric dies at 137f, sous vide that bear meat

Darby_Crenshaw

Exactly. Bear, wild boar, racoon, etc

 but i don't think there has been a  ase of trichinosis from commercial pork in about 40yrs. Which is around the time they started to become fed in massive feedlots on train etc

Virtually no chance of it in beef either. Tough to get trich from corn and truckloads of antibiotics 

fishlessman

but then again ive eaten undercooked bear steaks and survived, bear is lousy overcooked. someone put a skinned paw in someones lunch box here at work, if you never saw a skinned paw, its creepy, the guy went white when he opened the box

Darby_Crenshaw

Used to go to the fish and game dinners in pelham. Had plenty of bear, but never the hands. 

Would be good in a dutch over. Two at a time. Kinda look like jeffrey dahmer's valentine's day dinner for two

blind99

The incidence of trich is very low in modern pig farming probably because the pigs aren't eating food sitting on dirt. Trich incidence is much higher in fancy free range pigs that root around in the dirt. 

Darby_Crenshaw

That's what i meant by grain in feedlots

trich is now wxclusively found in home-bred pork or game (game which feeds on trash, scrap, compost, etc.)

blind99

DC you should make some YouTube videos. Combination of curing or cooking technique with some science / food safety thrown in. I'd watch. 

Darby_Crenshaw

nope.

think of how many times i (and others) have explained this stuff here.  so many times that anyone who's been here a couple years will roll their eyes "this cr^p again!" whenever we type five more words on the matter

and yet people still don't understand it or "get it". and that's fine . they don't have to be interested.

they tend to skim to posts and mentally file it away, but never quite understand what the process is until they do it.  human nature.

then, when they want to try it, they ask again, and all the same questions about "baddies" arise, among other things.

this stuff breaks down into two camps:

-I'm interested in this, and want to learn how to do it and understand it, so that i can make my own food with confidence, and learn to appreciate the tradition and hopefully learn to appreciate the nuances

-I like eating this stuff, everyone seems to be doing it, it looks cool, I like eating cool food, let's go!

one of these guys is going to flinch in the kitchen and throw out a perfectly good roast when his wife raises an eyebrow or he spots mold. despite having read fifty threads on the forum about how to do it safely, why it is safe, what can go wrong, etc.

if i had a youtube channel of this stuff, some guy in middle america is going to "follow" the directions, get sick, and come after me.

of course it always ends up being a case of "i followed your directions.  but, well, i didn't feel safe unwrapping the meat, so i laid a towel over it because i heard that from a guy i know at work. " followed by five other improvised steps, all counter to the very simple logic involved.

about five years ago when curing on the forum was the rage, there was a guy who went in full tilt.  and he followed recipes line by line.  but he didn't UNDERSTAND them.  despite the thing telling you it was safe to hang to meat at cool-ish room temps (and more importantly WHY), he'd panic after a day, and put it back into the fridge in a baggie.  then he'd talk himself back into it, and take it out and hang it again.  then he'd lay awake at night afraid he was gonna kill his family.  next day he cut the thing in half to check it.  then panicked about cutting it, and salted the sh!t out of the cut part.  put it back in the fridge.  and so on.

after five days of this, i'd get an off-forum email asking "is it ok?"

fvcked if i know.  it was fine on  day one, but you did everything wrong to it you possibly could have.

driving a car is very simple.  any idiot can do it.  but you don't get into a car unless you have learned how to do it, and why we do certain things one way and not another.

same for curing, or, frankly, any semi-advanced cooking method/recipe.

i like to try to back waaaay up and explain how and why, so that people aren't guessing.  but it takes time, and words.  and the one thing no one really cares about these days is reading, or words.

re curing.  it is simple.  it is based in logic.  it has NOTHING to do with making food taste cool, though.  it's all accidental.  we historically cured in order to make food safe and store it.  and we have found through trial and error that we can THEN tweak it and add other flavor.

heck, you don't even need a fridge.  you STILL don't.  people make prosciutto in a trash bag in his garage (another story)

example re no refrigeration.... 

take a bunch of salmon you just caught.  look around your coastal iron age round-house compound.  see that fridges have not been invented for a few thousand years yet.  damn.  we can't eat it. what are we gonna do with it?

better get rid of it before it stinks up the place.  live and learn, just bury it, ok? call it a loss.  take the fish to the seashore, and bury them in the sand. easy digging

forget about the salmon, like we forget about trash at the roadside after the truck is gone.  you are too busy trying to cultivate crops for the first time or make an axe from bog ore.

but someone remembers that salmon a month or two later, maybe the dog got into it. well look at THAT?  is it still good? who knows.  seems ok.  looks the same.  doesn't smell like a dead body does.  feed some to the dog.

and then let the village idiot trie some.  he's ok too.  boom.  we just found a way to store salmon.

but damn, it's sandy isn't it?

so let's try it again.  only keep the sand from getting on it by wrapping it in a plastic wrap.  wait.  plastic wrap hasn't been invented yet either, so use that nice smelling green stuff growing by the house.  wrap the fish in that stuff that modern man will refer to as "herbs", and maybe that will keep the sand off it. buried where it is, the animals will stay away hopefully.  and the wetness and relative cold helps too [NB see "water cache"].  and unbeknownst to you, but still happening anyway, the salt is working on the fish

you, iron age dude.  you invented gravlax.

"grav" means "grave"

"lax" means salmon

"gravlax"="grave salmon"


anyway... that guy also hung his gutted deer up for a while, because he couldn't eat it all at once.  strips of it laid in the sun would dry.  maybe some salt on it too or pepper to keep flies away.  boom.  jerky.

which is why it seems cute to me when someone panics over an unbreached pack of hot dogs in the fridge that;s a week past the sell by date.

lots of folks associate a lot of stuff with being a 'man'.  we can each name twenty things, maybe.  type of bber you drink, how big your truck is, etc.

i find it hilarious these same guys are afraid of yesterday's ham.

fishlessman

Darby_Crenshaw said:

nope.

think of how many times i (and others) have explained this stuff here.  so many times that anyone who's been here a couple years will roll their eyes "this cr^p again!" whenever we type five more words on the matter

and yet people still don't understand it or "get it". and that's fine . they don't have to be interested.

they tend to skim to posts and mentally file it away, but never quite understand what the process is until they do it.  human nature.

then, when they want to try it, they ask again, and all the same questions about "baddies" arise, among other things.

this stuff breaks down into two camps:

-I'm interested in this, and want to learn how to do it and understand it, so that i can make my own food with confidence, and learn to appreciate the tradition and hopefully learn to appreciate the nuances

-I like eating this stuff, everyone seems to be doing it, it looks cool, I like eating cool food, let's go!

one of these guys is going to flinch in the kitchen and throw out a perfectly good roast when his wife raises an eyebrow or he spots mold. despite having read fifty threads on the forum about how to do it safely, why it is safe, what can go wrong, etc.

if i had a youtube channel of this stuff, some guy in middle america is going to "follow" the directions, get sick, and come after me.

of course it always ends up being a case of "i followed your directions.  but, well, i didn't feel safe unwrapping the meat, so i laid a towel over it because i heard that from a guy i know at work. " followed by five other improvised steps, all counter to the very simple logic involved.

about five years ago when curing on the forum was the rage, there was a guy who went in full tilt.  and he followed recipes line by line.  but he didn't UNDERSTAND them.  despite the thing telling you it was safe to hang to meat at cool-ish room temps (and more importantly WHY), he'd panic after a day, and put it back into the fridge in a baggie.  then he'd talk himself back into it, and take it out and hang it again.  then he'd lay awake at night afraid he was gonna kill his family.  next day he cut the thing in half to check it.  then panicked about cutting it, and salted the sh!t out of the cut part.  put it back in the fridge.  and so on.

after five days of this, i'd get an off-forum email asking "is it ok?"

fvcked if i know.  it was fine on  day one, but you did everything wrong to it you possibly could have.

driving a car is very simple.  any idiot can do it.  but you don't get into a car unless you have learned how to do it, and why we do certain things one way and not another.

same for curing, or, frankly, any semi-advanced cooking method/recipe.

i like to try to back waaaay up and explain how and why, so that people aren't guessing.  but it takes time, and words.  and the one thing no one really cares about these days is reading, or words.

re curing.  it is simple.  it is based in logic.  it has NOTHING to do with making food taste cool, though.  it's all accidental.  we historically cured in order to make food safe and store it.  and we have found through trial and error that we can THEN tweak it and add other flavor.

heck, you don't even need a fridge.  you STILL don't.  people make prosciutto in a trash bag in his garage (another story)

example re no refrigeration.... 

take a bunch of salmon you just caught.  look around your coastal iron age round-house compound.  see that fridges have not been invented for a few thousand years yet.  damn.  we can't eat it. what are we gonna do with it?

better get rid of it before it stinks up the place.  live and learn, just bury it, ok? call it a loss.  take the fish to the seashore, and bury them in the sand. easy digging

forget about the salmon, like we forget about trash at the roadside after the truck is gone.  you are too busy trying to cultivate crops for the first time or make an axe from bog ore.

but someone remembers that salmon a month or two later, maybe the dog got into it. well look at THAT?  is it still good? who knows.  seems ok.  looks the same.  doesn't smell like a dead body does.  feed some to the dog.

and then let the village idiot trie some.  he's ok too.  boom.  we just found a way to store salmon.

but damn, it's sandy isn't it?

so let's try it again.  only keep the sand from getting on it by wrapping it in a plastic wrap.  wait.  plastic wrap hasn't been invented yet either, so use that nice smelling green stuff growing by the house.  wrap the fish in that stuff that modern man will refer to as "herbs", and maybe that will keep the sand off it. buried where it is, the animals will stay away hopefully.  and the wetness and relative cold helps too [NB see "water cache"].  and unbeknownst to you, but still happening anyway, the salt is working on the fish

you, iron age dude.  you invented gravlax.

"grav" means "grave"

"lax" means salmon

"gravlax"="grave salmon"


anyway... that guy also hung his gutted deer up for a while, because he couldn't eat it all at once.  strips of it laid in the sun would dry.  maybe some salt on it too or pepper to keep flies away.  boom.  jerky.

which is why it seems cute to me when someone panics over an unbreached pack of hot dogs in the fridge that;s a week past the sell by date.

lots of folks associate a lot of stuff with being a 'man'.  we can each name twenty things, maybe.  type of bber you drink, how big your truck is, etc.

i find it hilarious these same guys are afraid of yesterday's ham.

is my xmas prosciutto in the fridge still safe to eat

Darby_Crenshaw

nope.  leave it on your porch tonight.  i am usually by anyway every night around 2am to peek into your windows, i'll grab it then

nolaegghead

Now I'm excited about my 60-day dry aged pork crown roast sitting in my shop fridge. 

Darby_Crenshaw

Was it already crowned?  Wanna keep them whole if you can. Too much exposed flesh otherwise

nolaegghead

It's whole. 

nolaegghead

I'll snap a picture of it later.

shtgunal3

So are you saying I should throw away the choice New York strips I have in the fridge that "went out of date" yesterday? 

Darby_Crenshaw

@nolaegghead: well then it ain't a crown roast yet, is it?  derp a derp a duuuuh!

@shtgunal3:  hoping that is sarcasm!

Ozzie_Isaac

@Darby_Crenshaw thank you for the explanation.  I don't use sell by or expiration dates thanks to this forum.

I understand about surface bacteria, is there anything deeper in the muscle to be concerned about?  Parasites or things of that sort?

nolaegghead

@Darby_Crenshaw dammit!  it was mislabeled.