Can i age beef at home

My fridge will be another evolution of that mold again, with a Texas twist being added into the Ohio hybrid. This is also the reason you want to make sure not to put any additional items in your dry aging fridge, and to keep the door closed as much as possible. Black mold is bad, folks. Thus suggesting, whether to mold or not mold is up to personal preference.

I like getting funky. There are important two factors you need to consider when approaching the preparation and cooking stage: palatibility and food safety. The rind does not soften during the cooking process and so needs to be removed. When trimming back your rind, you may notice that there are parts of the muscle itself that have turned a brown shade. In most cases, this is nothing but oxidization of the myoglobin, a harmless color change. You should be able to make a judgement call here using smell and touch, but if in doubt, trim it away.

Food poisoning is not fun, FYI. When you sear a steak, the surface area comes into contact with high heat which kills of any bacteria. So this is where the bone comes into play. Basically, the bone is going to remain a fairground for bacteria and mold. If you want to serve your steak with the bone, cut the bone away, cook your steak as normal, throw the bone into a super hot oven to roast which will make it taste better when gnawed anyway and serve together.

Skip to content Share this. Can you do it? Is it simple? Yes, and no. Is it something you can do easily without a dedicated setup?

Hell no. My home dry aging set up. A very esteemed writer in the meat world who I personally admire wrote about his dry aging experiment where he used the office fridge as a test lab. Do you have ANY idea how many times a day that thing is opened and closed? Not to mention the variety of questionably-sealed food it houses! Put it this way — I would refuse to eat a piece of meat that had been aged under those circumstances.

Domestic fridges are often warmer than the recommended safe temperature of 40f, due to inaccurate thermostats and the door being frequently opened. Other items stored in the fridge can also taint the flavor of your meat. DO know the difference between funky and foul.

One will be weird, but not unpleasant, like blue cheese. Perhaps not unanimously liked by everyone, but still pleasant. The other will make you recoil in disgust. Do not eat the latter. DO NOT use the dedicated dry aging fridge as storage for any other items aside from meats you specifically mean to age.

Plus, any other items can lead to cross contamination of flavor profiles into the fat. Though some people prefer wet-aged steaks, most Americans prefer dry-aged beef. While a small amount of enzymatic changes can happen in wet-aged beef, the overall change is minimal. Wet-aging is popular with many grocery stores because it is a far less expensive process than dry-aging. While dry-aging typically takes weeks, requires specialized aging lockers, and causes product loss due to trimming and evaporation, wet-aging takes less time, less equipment, and causes no loss of product.

As a result, wet-aged beef is easier to find and cheaper to buy. One popular misconception is that you can dry-age steaks by lining them with cheesecloth or paper towel, then leaving them in your fridge for four to seven days. While this method dehydrates steaks which can heighten flavor intensity , it does not properly age them.

Okay, I'm sold. Why would I possibly want to do it at home when I can order it online or from my butcher? Two reasons. First, bragging rights. How awesome is that dinner party gonna be where you tell your friends, "Like this beef? I aged it for eight weeks myself"? Second, it saves you money. Lots of money.

Aging meat takes time and space, and time and space cost money. This cost gets passed on to the consumer. At home, so long as you're willing to give up a corner of your fridge or you have an extra mini fridge, the extra costs are minimal. You may have read that, in addition to the time and space required, much of the cost of aged meat comes down to the amount of meat that is wasted—that is, meat that dries out and needs to be trimmed. This is not as big a factor as you'd think, and we'll find out why soon.

What cut of meat should I buy for aging? To age meat properly, you need to choose a large piece that is best cooked with quick cooking methods. This makes the standard steakhouse cuts—the New York strip, the rib steak, and the porterhouse—the ideal cuts for aging. See here for more information on the four high-end steaks you should know. The easiest to find whole and my personal favorite is the rib steak, which is what you get when you cut a prime rib between the bone into individual steaks.

What's the minimum size I'll need to buy for proper aging? Can I age an individual steak? Nope, unfortunately, you can't age individual steaks. See here for more details as to why not.

You can wrap them in cheesecloth or paper towels, set them on a rack, and leave them in the fridge for about a week, but during that time, no detectable level of texture or flavor changes will take place. The meat is so dried out as to be completely inedible. After trimming away the desiccated and slightly moldy bits perfectly normal for dry-aged meat , I was left with a sliver of meat about a half centimeter thick.

It was impossible to cook to anything lower than well-done, making my effective yield a big fat zero. The simple truth is that in order to dry-age, you need larger cuts of meat, and you need to age them in open air.

So, of the larger cuts of meat, what should I look for? Rib sections come in several different forms, each with its own number designation. I found that the more protection you have, the better your final yield. Why does protection from the exterior matter when aging meat?

It's because when you dry-age meat for any length of time that's enough to make a difference, the exterior layers get completely desiccated and must be trimmed away. The less protected the "good" meat, the more of it you'll throw in the trash and waste. Here's what happens when you try to age a Export:. See how much of that poor spinalis muscle has withered away and dried?

I had to completely remove it before I found meat that I was able to cook underneath. And that is not meat you want to waste. On the other hand, here's what you're left with after removing the fat cap on a A:. Trim off the fat a bit more, as well as the cut faces, and here's what we've got:. The yield you get amounts to basically the equivalent of a completely normal-sized roast. If you imagine your prime rib as a long cylinder, the only meat you actually end up losing is from either end.

The fat cap and bones will completely protect the sides. So really, aged meat doesn't lose much moisture. Isn't that one of the reasons why aged steak is so expensive? Don't believe everything you read. What they don't tell you is that the weight is almost exclusively lost from the outer layers—that is, the portion of the meat that is going to be trimmed off anyway , regardless of whether it's aged or not.

Or that aged bone-in steaks are not stretching and pulling away from their bones—I mean, surely the bones aren't shrinking as well, are they? The fact is, with the exception of the cut faces that need to be trimmed off, the edible portion of an aged prime rib is pretty much identical to that of a fresh prime rib.

Okay, let's say I'm convinced about that. Does that mean that the whole idea that "meat flavor is concentrated" in an aged steak because of dehydration is also false?

I'm afraid so. It's a great idea in theory, but several facts don't support it. First, there's simple visual inspection: A trimmed steak cut from an aged piece of beef is pretty much the exact same size as a trimmed steak cut from a fresh piece of beef.

In addition, I measured the density of beef aged to various degrees against that of completely fresh meat. To do this, I cut out chunks of meat of identical weights from the centers of ribeyes aged to various degrees, making sure to exclude any large swaths of fat. I then submerged each of these chunks of meat in water and measured their displacement. A slight increase, but not much. What's more, once the meat was cooked, these differences in density completely disappeared. That is, the less aged the meat was, the more moisture it expelled.

Why is this? One of the side effects of aging is the breakdown of meat protein and connective tissue. This makes the meat more tender, as well as causing it to contract less as it cooks. Finally, a simple taste test was the nail in the coffin: Meat dry-aged for 21 days the period during which the largest change in density of the internal meat occurs was indistinguishable from fresh meat in terms of flavor. The improvements were in texture alone. It wasn't until between the and day marks that real, noticeable changes in flavor occurred, and during that time period, there was essentially no change in internal density.