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Please log in or create a free account. Log In Sign Up. This feature has been temporarily disabled during the beta site preview. How did this mysterious steak-master control the time, temperature, and taste of the beef?
How many iterations were attempted before they discovered how to age steak the right way? More importantly, why, through all that aging, does beef taste so much better -- more flavorful, deeper, and richer -- with aging?
What scientific occurrences are happening while mold steadily grows on meat, which cuts are the best to storm those long days of flavor development, and can one even attempt to capture those flavors at home? To speak to these burning inquiries, I decided to raise the steaks no, I am not sorry for that and go on a journey to get all these questions answered -- for myself, for my grateful taste buds, and for you, dear reader, so you don't feel like a pleb for asking them when you're ordering an expensive steak at a fancy restaurant.
To put it simply: dry aging makes a flavor bomb out of your meat. Flavors develop in a spectacularly nutty, funky way that differs greatly from fresh meat. Over time, the flavors continue to concentrate as moisture evaporates from the cut. There are two ways to age a steak. Dry-aging involves leaving the meat to age, usually loosely-wrapped in cheesecloth, in a temperature- and humidity-controlled space.
Wet-aged steaks, on the other hand, are sealed n vacuum-packed Cryovac bags. So why do so many folks swear by dry-aging? The answer has to do with retaining moisture. Ironically, the wet-aging process leaves the meat dryer, at least according to Dean Poll, the owner of Gallaghers Steakhouse , the iconic New York City eatery where Broadway stars and alleged mafia bosses have been dining since And it is breaking down, the enzymes are breaking down. When you dry age a meat, that blood is staying in the meat and gives it its moisture.
There's also some shrinkage. You'll notice immediately that the purple core is significantly smaller, and it's soon followed by a brownish layer, and finally a dark, cherry-red layer on the exterior. What's going on here? It's a matter of timing. The brown color is the color of metmyoglobin , the form that oxymyoglobin converts to after prolonged exposure to oxygen.
In the case of this steak, oxidation has penetrated deep enough and far enough into the steak as to create a significant ring of deoxymyoglobin. Meanwhile, the very outer layers of the steak have taken on a deep, dark red color, an indication that moisture loss has led to an increase in density around the edges of the steak, and therefore an intensification in color. What this also tells us is that in the timeframe we're talking—up to a week or more—small molecules do indeed penetrate deep into a steak.
Is it possible that some of those molecules might be affecting flavor? And what about that dried out edge? How would that affect texture and flavor? A quick gag-inducing sniff test proved the worst in the case of the nine-day aged steaks: They were all rotten.
Even cutting into them revealed a core of edible meat only a few eighths of an inch thick. I threw them out, rather than risk the health of my tasters. I cooked the remaining steaks in a large cast iron pan, using an infrared thermometer to ensure that the surface temperature of the pan was identical before placing the meat inside it. Normally, I'd cook my steaks by flipping them frequently in order to promote faster, more even cooking throughout the meat. In this case, however, I stuck to a single flip in the middle for the sake of easy repetition and accuracy.
Take a look at the steak on the right versus the one on the left below. This happens for two reasons. First, more moisture can cause it to buckle and bend when that moisture suddenly starts to leave thanks to the heat of the pan , causing certain areas of the steak to shrink faster than others. Small perturbations in the surface of the meat are amplified.
Second, because those browning reactions collectively known as the Maillard reaction take place when proteins and sugars are heated to high temperatures—generally in excess of degrees or so. Meat contains a lot of water, which acts as a built-in temperature regulator, preventing the meat from getting too hot until it mostly evaporates. So for completely fresh meat to brown properly, this surface moisture must first be driven off.
Meat that has spent time in the refrigerator, however, already has a dry surface, allowing it to brown more efficiently.
Slow browning is not the end of the world—just by letting the steak sit a few seconds longer on each side, I easily compensated for the discrepancies.
Even more interestingly, the biggest difference in browning was between the non-aged steak and the one-day aged steak. After that, there wasn't much difference, no matter how long the steak was aged. Indeed, subsequent testing showed that even an overnight 8- to hour rest on a rack in the fridge is sufficient to create a dry enough surface on the meat for optimized browning.
Certainly much better browning. The tender issue is debatable. The drier exterior seemed to make the interior feel moister and more tender. But we did not taste blind in this case.
Other than browning, I noticed no major differences in the way the steaks cooked. The real surprise came after I weighed all of the steaks post-cooking to see how much moisture they lost from their original state. Well, would you look at that? What this means is that whatever moisture loss occurs in the very outer layers of the steak due to dehydration during aging would have been lost anyway during cooking.
It also indicates—even before tasting—that any arguments that rely on the concentration of meat flavors due to moisture loss are most likely bogus, since the final moisture loss is identical in all the steaks across the board. How would they stack up in actual blind tastings? I performed two separate taste tests, using two separate groups of tasters to gather my results. The first taste test was a simple blind side-by-side ranking, in which I asked tasters to taste all the meat, give me notes on relative tenderness and flavor, and rank them in order of preference.
Between the steaks aged for zero, one, two, and five days, there was no discernible pattern to their preferences. The one result that did show a definite trend was that the seven-day aged steak was consistently ranked at the bottom in terms of flavor, with tasters citing "old refrigerator" and "stale" flavors.
So there is indeed something to Mark Pastore's claim that meat will pick up the flavors present in a refrigerator. For the second round of taste tests, I went one step further, performing a triangle test, the standard test when rigorous results are needed for sensory-based studies. To perform the test, a subject is presented with three sample. Two of the samples are identical, while the third is different. 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.
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