Aged meat

Unknown · July 2007

Ok, I have been wanting to ask this for a long time, but really dident want to sound dumb. I cant wait no more. I have a few questions about aged meat.
First, WHY and HOW do you age meat? when I leave it in the frige to long it starts to stink and grow fuzz.[p] Second, What cuts benifit and how do they benitit from the aging process?[p]I know I risk sounding stupid for not knowing this (was really hoping someone else would have asked) but I dont know and would like to. Thanks in advance

Unknown · July 2007

Bad Influence,
This website has some useful info on aging beef. [p]http://www.askthemeatman.com/dry_aged_beef.htm[p]Jerr

stike · July 2007

<p />Bad Influence,
first question, if you did it perfectly, and it looked like this, would you ghave the guts to serve it to your wife from the fridge?[p]
stink is bad, fuzz is ok. fuzz comes off. a slight tinge of "gamey" smell (clean though) is GOOD.[p]i always advise anyone that wants to try dry aging at home to go out and buy a dry-aged rib eye first. spend the relatively exorbitant money first. why?? it' actually cheaper to see if you like a 25 dollar steak than it is to ruin a 50 dollar roast.[p]the other thing is that you may not notice a huge difference. i didn't, not at first. it's a lot like wine, and not in a snooty, fancified way. you need a lot of time trying varieties before you may notice any differences. it took me maybe a year of eating steaks off the egg to really be able to develop a taste for the differences between strip, ribeye, tenderloin, etc. when you add in prime vs. choice, and then dry-aged (14, 21, 45 days), it can get pretty esoteric.[p]my first dry aged steak was a waste of cash because it came when i first got the egg and was in the "honeymoon". regular supermarket steak was so good, i pretty much couldn't taste anything better from the dry-aged stuff, and pronounced it "nothing special".[p]fast-forward that year of really paying attention, and i really DO feel there's a difference, and one that's worth it, to me anyway. still, it's a once a month thing, maybe[p]i'll copy/paste something i wrote last year, which is long... but it's where my head is at, with regard to aged beef and aging at home.[p]
OLD, windy, blathering post from last year....>>[p]no expert here, but i have been chasing this stuff down long enough that i think i finally have it sorted out. i have done it myself, and i have also thrown out meat after trying it. my fridge was off-temp.
first, it should not look or smell 'rotten'. and SO then this is my BIGGEST chunk of advice. don't bother dry aging until you have had commercial dry aged steaks done properly.
for one thing, you may not notice a difference, frankly. when i got the egg i was so gung-ho i was cooking anything i could find and soon was getting nutty, which became "must-find-dry-aged-steak". i bought one from julia child's butcher (still making payments on it). at the time we said "so-so. not worth the money". part of that was because the steaks we'd been having from the egg were so much better than off the gasser, the difference was lost on us. we were still in the egg honeymoon phase.
now, maybe 4 years later eating BGE steaks, and finally being able to tell the diff between cuts, and we DO appreciate a difference.
so, here we go. a dedicated fridge (a spare fridge in the basement, etc.) is ideal, but not absolutely necessary. some good points in posts below explaining why. off-odors from other foods in the fridge, plus temp swings from open/closing. if you have a beer fridge, it's ideal. you cannot at ALL trust the thermo setting on the fridge. don't play around here. bacteria wants badly to grow, and it'll find a way. it MUST be kept between 34-38 degrees (gives you 2 degrees safe room from freezing and 2 degrees on the other end below the safety zone of 40 degrees). get a fridge thermo and let it go a few days as you check/adjust the fridge before aging. remember, aging starts to pay off on day 14 or so. some as long as 45 days. all you need is 4 hours of above-40 temps, and you risk squatting on the toilet and counting floor tiles for a day or so.
you do need to do the whole primal (or roast). you should cut all your steaks at once after aging if you can. that's so before slicing them, you can more easily trim off any moldy parts (if any), and anything overly dry and leathery. you don't have to trim all over to reveal 'new' flesh underneath. just remove anything that feels freezer burnt or is off color. ...that'll be a dicey call if you are unfamiliar with how it should look.
if you age it correctly, you will enjoy a certain 'funk' to the meat. for lack of a better description (and i don't ever count this word as a negative) it is 'gamey'. the smell is predominantly from the natural enzymes (not living things) which break down the tissue and produce great little ester by-product luvin which give it depth. you should be able to take a deep close sniff and think only, "that's different" rather than retch and hurl in the sink.
it should NOT get slimy AT ALL. the outside should be cold and clammy/waxy feeling, with no slime. slime is bacterial and it WILL make you throw up upon smelling. slimey? toss it.
this is why you should pay for a real dry-aged steak first, so you can taste it and SMELL it. you don't want to put a hundred dollar chunk of meat in your fridge and after 21 days, when your wife whiffs it, have to shrug when she asks if it's ok to eat. look at the above pic. that was last night's steak. would you eat that if it came out of YOUR fridge? that was from a butcher, aged 45 days. if the answer is 'no', well, then you may want to skip this experiment!
alton's method is spot on, though on the show he does NOT use towels if i remember correctly though i think his posted recipe does. you don't need them if you are going for true dry-aging. in fact, they may wick water away from the meat, but they then hold it close to the meat. they can also be a breeding ground for bacteria (though if temps are ok, you would be ok). you want as much free air around it as possible. ideally, a small good dorm fridge (which holds correct temp) would be perfect. the bottom (coldest) portion of a lesser-used fridge, with the meat in that tupperware coffin (holes drilled all over for air-circ) which alton usues, is great. i have done them up on a wire rack in a roasting pan and uncovered (in my beer fridge).
good luck, but seriously, do not even bother if you haven't had a dry-aged steak to begin with.
if i may go all out on the know-it-all branch here, if you do go get a commercially dry-aged steak, try the rib eye first. a strip steak (un aged) for me is my go-to steak, but dry-aged, nuthin beats the rib eye. it has the most fat of all the cuts traditionally aged, and the fat gets literally hard, and condenses so much it is damn near butter (which is beef fat, essentially). tenderloin is already tender, and may get more so from aging, but it will gain flavor from the enzymatic action. i think a good old regular un-aged strip is so good, i don't bother with the aged ones any more.
oh, and use prime if you can. half of what you are doing is condensing the fat, and if there's not a good amount of marbling, you'll miss out. you also want a good fat layer on the exterior, as insurance against microbial ne'er-do-wells.
sorry for blathering, but this is something i am pretty passionate about and love to do/have.[p]

mad max beyond eggdome · July 2007

stike,
dang jeff, never new you could be so comprehensive and comprehendable this early on a sunday morning ....nice dissertation on dry aging. ..

Unknown · July 2007

Jerr,
Thanks. That did help

YB · July 2007

stike,
How was vacation Jeff?Glad to see you back.
Larry

Unknown · July 2007

stike,
Thanks so much for the info. Was something I wanted to know but was afraid to ask.

stike · July 2007

YB,
was great, thanks very much.
i fought the battle of the borrowed weber. it smacked me around a bit, but i eked a couple decent cooks. mostly burgers and dogs, though. [p]some stuff i liked about it, but i really missed the egg.[p]

stike · July 2007

mad max beyond eggdome,
dood. that was pre-coffee, too. but it was also a cut-and-paste from a previous post. hahaha.[p]i noticed too late that the formatting fell apart. it wasn't originally all run-together like that.[p]

stike · July 2007

Bad Influence,
best thing to do is ask![p]i vacillate between not answering sometimes, and answering WAY TOO MUCH.[p]lots of folks are sick of hearing me blather on about dry aged beef, among other things.[p]i guess all that boils down to: master the good-old stalwart "choice" steaks (strip/ribeye/tenderloin) until you really notice differences. then try the "different" stuff. dry-aged, grass-fed, and heirloom beef, etc. [p]if you notice a nice difference (one worth paying for!), then you are officially a steak-head, and would probably enjoy aging at home (or, i guess, raising grass-fed heirloom cattle!).[p]my humble admission is that it took me a long time to appreciate the difference. [p]

YB · July 2007

stike,
Glad you had a good time.I will be without a egg in September for 8 days.We did rent the house at Martha's Vineyard from 9-7 to 9-15 and we are flying so no egg.
Larry

stike · July 2007

YB,
trying to figure out what other vacation we are taking. looking like a week a month until september. [p]maybe we'll visitate with you while you are there...[p]close enough for us to do a weekend or somethin.

YB · July 2007

stike,
Sounds good to me.
Larry

An Egg Downunder · July 2007

stike,
Looks like you lost your caps at the same time, Captain.

stike · July 2007

An Egg Downunder,
thanks ace, never noticed.

Aged meat

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