Dry Aged Beef - What’s All The Hype About?

So, today we are going to unravel all the secrets behind

beef

jerky. Have you ever wondered why all the best steakhouses in the world now almost exclusively use Edge Beef Jerky? Well, let's find out and stay because I'm going to show You know exactly how you can dry Edge meat at home at the end of this once we're done here because not everyone has access to all these fancy dry edges like I do, we're going to be stuck so First things first,

what

is dry aging, well it's not. just leave the meat to dry and dry aging can be anywhere from 24 days like we have here until I did one at 200 days last year.

I did a brief on him. It will be linked below. Go check that out. Figure it out if you want, but good advice: it wasn't great, it was too much for me, so the most important thing about dry aging is temperature, humidity and airflow. You have to do all three things right to ensure that you dry-age safely and effectively. Humans have actually been dry-aging for millennia before refrigeration. In some parts of the world where it was cold and windy, people literally stored their meat and all types of meat by simply hanging it in dark sheds so that the wind and temperature will be controlled by the natural environment, which is

what

we are trying to imitate here Now, let's be as scientific as this Chef can be.

I'm not a food scientist, but dry aging effectively evaporates moisture from the muscle creating a greater concentration of meat. taste and flavor, there is also a natural enzyme that breaks down the cell walls of the meat molecules and the breakdown of the cell walls makes the meat much more tender and the longer you cook it, the more tender it becomes. Oh look at that, why? Doesn't meat spoil well? The exterior of the meat toughens and protects the internal muscles. Bacteria don't go crazy. Bacteria need moisture to survive. If you take that out of the equation, they simply can't survive anymore once the outside of the meat.

The molds have hardened and are starting to take over, so it is very important that you do not put anything else in the refrigerator because you are dry. The edges of the molds are very similar to the penic silia type molds found in many cheeses. which is also why you find people who like very ripe, stinky, strong cheeses, they also like

beef

with very long dry edges, so we just open this thing up, the first thing I always do is Give it the sniff test and it shouldn't smell strong, it should smell. nice and clean and not very normal it doesn't smell much to be honest it just smells like good beef.

What I'm looking for is no really nasty blemishes or dark spots. What you want is nice, pink-looking meat. a very young piece of dragee, this is at most 24 days old, I think it's a lot younger than I would normally put it out, but I wanted to show it, you know, for the sake of this video, don't worry, it will get. As you can see here, this is where the outside is dry on the crust, which you can't, you can't leave it there, it's super hard, you have to cut it before you start cooking it, but I'm I'm very happy with this piece.

This is a piece of Blue Diamond. You can see it's still nice and rosy red. It's not like a super high marble score piece of meat, but you can see it has a really nice delicious piece of intramuscular fat. of beef that will only get better by dry aging it, but let's cut off a piece and cook it and see what it really tastes like. The big question: should you try dry edged beef at home? Well, first of all, it's delicious the way it is. just at 24 days old it doesn't have a very strong flavor or anything at all, it's definitely very tender and has a great meaty flavor, but let's talk about the advantages of dried edges at home, well, it's a lot cheaper, TRUE?

You're going to lose about 25. Up to 30% loss, so if you buy EDG dry-

aged

beef, someone is going to charge you for that, whether it's the butcher or the processor, whoever is cutting the edges dry so you can bear that cost. It is also much cheaper to buy in large. cuts of meat like this yourself and then buy individual bets. The other advantage is that you can start taking things to different l L and play around and see what you like. I know I like my steaks between 45 and 55 days, that's it. The sweet spot for me personally and the negatives, well, it costs a bit of money to set up.

You'll have to buy a refrigerator, you know, a small bar refrigerator or something, and some other things that will be implemented in the future. One minute is also the safety aspect. You have to be careful when you are doing these things right now. Of course, I will show you how to do it and if you want to do it at your own risk. Cheer up. I've never had a problem with this, but I just want to warn that I'm not a meat professional. I'm just repeating information I learned along the way working in this industry, so rest assured. be careful with space, you have to be careful, you have to have a place where you can keep a cooler and you can't let anyone else use it, it can't have anything else in it, you can't even put a piece of beer in it, you can't put nothing else on this thing, you need to make sure it's there just for the dry

aged

beef and if you're not scared yet, then let's go home and I'll show you how to do it.

I installed a dry Ager in my own house, in fact it's not even in my own house, it's next to Mitch's desk, but that's the problem before we go, let's have Mitch test this piece, let's cook another one piece or Dry another piece and we'll see what you think of that in 30 more days. What is 24? That's 24. It's delicious. It's good. Yes that's fine. Remember that because in 30 days I'm going to ask you to do it again. this is also there that marble with score 9 Jade that is in the miniature Jade is a purebred Australian wagu product this is as good as the marble with score 9 you can still see the intramuscular fat I actually don't think I have ever eaten score from marble 9 plus and Jade, oh my god, that was also 24 days old and it's probably one of the best editing challenges in my life.

I'm not just saying it's true, I'm so excited, wow, that's just as good. how it goes on like butter wow, I thought it was going to be too rich, it's not and you said you can't eat all that. I think I could eat. You might eat too delicious fish anyway. Anyway, back to work Mitchell. I have work to do, that's great, okay, we just got back from the test kitchen, um, and it's really hot in here, so I changed it into shorts. I wasn't wearing shorts in the kitchen, um, but this is the setup. what we have this is the average of the baridge M uh, I have a glass door, one here you can, you don't have to have a glass door, it's just easier to see while things are happening inside, the other thing that's important However , what is very important is the wire shelves, you don't want the flat glass shelves and you want to make sure they are clean, so the ideal is to buy a new one that you disinfect quickly if you have a baridge and you don't want to. go and buy a new one which is totally fine but make sure you clean it very very well and then you want to have it somewhere that doesn't get too hot so here in Quenson I couldn't put this in my garage. at 40°C a couple of times a day there is no problem, it makes it very difficult for the refrigerator to maintain the temperature, so this is in Mitch and Caleb's offers, so let's talk about installing the refrigerator in the bar , it was cleaned very well, what is needed is air. flow, so what we have down here is a little USB fan that just pushes air the whole time we're on and we also have a U humidity monitor, this one is pretty cheap from Bunnings, it's nothing crazy.

Ideally the humidity should be between 75-85% at all times, now those big fancy ear dryers I have at work monitor the humidity and you can set it, you can't control it but what you can do is monitor it. and then what we're going to do is monitor it throughout this whole process and see if it gets out of that kind of 75 85% and if I can see if I can do things to combat it. I think you can add salt, which helps. There are a few other tips and tricks, but let's see if it maintains that temperature percentage.

So you want this refrigerator to operate between 2 and 4° C, which is. like 35 to 39° F really important, make sure you're between those parameters and if anything, I would stay on the lower side, so I like to run them at 2 2.5 anyway, let's prep this meat and put it in the refrigerator. so this is what we're going to dry, this is a line of carara wag marble strips from 6 to sorry, 8 to 9. I prefer to do what we call short loins in the industry. This is all I could get from the test kitchen. What a short tenderloin is is effectively the bone-in sirloin, as we saw in the Jade that we saw in the test kitchen, so this is just a filet, now the reason I like to use the short tenderloin is that it has a big bone which protects it and less is wasted, especially if you are in a butcher shop or a restaurant, you will definitely choose short lines instead of sir lines, all I'm going to do is take it out of the bag, this is one of the times.

I usually don't wear gloves when I cook, but we really want to control the amount of bacteria on the outside of this meat, so I'm going to wear gloves and just use them over and over again. Then they go to the trash can with a paper towel. I'm going to use a paper towel because I don't want to use kitchen towels or anything that has other bacteria on it. Make sure my board is nice and clean and we'll just go. To dry it out as much as possible, the next problem I have is that, as you just saw, the refrigerator that I have, which is just your Rofe M bar refrigerator, is not big enough to fit lengthwise, there are two ways to do it. deal with it, you can cut it in half and then you'll lose each one more on one side of each of that effectively or you can take the edges off these edges and just cook them by mistake, so that's the option we're going to take. because then we're still going to have a nice big piece, uh, but there's something to be tired of if you go to your butcher and ask for a short tenderloin, make sure it fits in your refrigerator because you're not going to. able to cut so easily most butchers have a band that will be able to shrink it if you ask them they will be able to cut it, but I suggest you buy the meat that is in the package it comes from.

The abire if this is hanging in a butcher shop, you don't want to take it home and dry it. Border it and the reason is that you don't know what happened to that piece of meat, you don't know how long it lasts. been out, you don't know who touched it, whether it comes from Avire and from countries like Australia or the United States or from wherever the coal supply chain is really good. It's really nice to know that that piece of meat is going to be in a good piece, a good position when you're done drying the edge, so all I'm going to do is take the face off each side so it fits in the refrigerator and I'm going to save these two steaks and I will probably eat them for dinner. nice P, we meet there, awesome, well, to our nice, clean and dry Eder, so here goes.

The Silo, I cut enough. Oh, I did and then we got the rib which is now about 25 days old, so there we are going to do it. come back I think, when will this post be published? Mitchell 35 days 35 days 35 days so we're gonna come 37 days so we're gonna pull this out and we're gonna cut it a couple of days before we post this video and we're gonna show you how. Everything went well, this piece came in at 25 days and had another 30 days and this had 30 days from start to finish. I struggled to keep the humidity at the desired 75-85% the entire time I struggled. the whole time i did things like put a glass of water in there, put a wet sponge in there, tried every trick i could find and couldn't get the humidity to stay above 60% and as time went on it kept going down. so I've never aged dry like that.

I have no idea if this is going to work or not. I've read some things that say if it's too dry you basically dry it too quickly so let's see what happened so this came in. 30 days ago I'm going to cut this right down the center and we'll see what it's like in the middle, the temperature definitely held up well so I'm not worried about it, but it looks pretty good, the pelic or the You know, the part we have to cut It is not the deep and fresh smell. You know, I'd love to go a little bit more into why you need that higher percentage and I think if you're doing really longer dry aging processes, that you know you probably need that, but it looks pretty good.

I'm very happy with that. You can tell when the dragee went bad if you see uh mysolation, if it goes off, it darkens if you have air pockets, you will smell it. I'll know right away that that's not right, this looks perfectly fine, what I was really worried about was the pelico getting big, so what you have to cut is the pelico, you can grind it up and use it in burgers if you want. 15% or something like that, but it seems fine ifDoes anyone have any other solutions they know of besides buying an actual dry Ager to control that humidity.

I'd love to know in the comments, let's take a look at this rib. that had 25 days on my dry edges at work and then had another 30 days on my simulated dry age below. The other thing that happened when I was putting the water in there that kept the humidity higher is that the back of the refrigerator kept freezing so we kept having to defrost it, that also looks pretty good now naturally the film is a little bit more thick on this piece because it's been dry Edge for 30 more days, but it smells good, I can't. I don't see any bacteria that concerns me on the outside.

I think we're safe anyway. I think it's time to cook some of this. We'll have Mitch try it. I'll try it too. I'll give you my final thoughts and let you know if I think it's worth taking home. It's a very nice steak. You see, this is a great example of an air pocket and unfortunately you're going to lose a lot of that. that kind of thing is a tomahawk or a ribeye bone, I should say, but because of that big pocket there, I'm actually going to remove that bone to try to save at least the riy steak, it's the other thing you have to do.

Keep in mind when you're doing dry age the waste is pretty high, that's why these steaks are so expensive in restaurants now, that was the final piece, but that's what we ended up with a very small rib eye steak that smells. Well, there is nothing wrong with that, other than to mention that this is a wagu product, this is a much more expensive piece of beef, so I let them sit for a while, let's see how they turned out, they cooked very well, delicious , tender, pleasant meat flavor. There's nothing wrong with that and then you cut a little bit off of this, so this is effectively how long 55 days are.

Really good Mitch. We'll have MIT come and try some too because he tried some last time. I'll be interested to see if you can. Tell someone if you can see any difference buddy come on try the next one first yeah that was the one you tried last time at 25 days 55 days this time its fun good day im not a food connoisseur probably It's not even the right one. term but honestly I'm not in this profession long enough to know the difference but it's very good I wouldn't I wouldn't be sad about that take your piece of Wago and get out of here you know it's good, it's very good that's fine, so which for me the extra time gave me a slightly more tender and tastier steak and it's not strong at all, it's not nutty, it just tastes meatier, so the bottom line is that after all, If you dry your own meat at home, Long story short, if you want to do it as an exercise or hobby, then do it, play around and see how you can control the humidity, so I couldn't master it.

I think it has something to do with the fact that we are in Queensland at the moment, it's been summer and it's been unbearably hot so the air conditioning has been on all the time which I think is drying out the whole house in a positive way most of the time in a negative way. In this case, I could have changed that. Put the refrigerator in the garage that does not have air conditioning, but the problem is that it is much hotter and that refrigerator would have a difficult time maintaining that type of temperature you are looking for, so if you drag it around the house without a proper Drager it is a dedicated refrigerator which is designed to dry, sure do.

I don't see any reason why not. I feel like you probably don't want to take them to the extreme length that you sometimes see people taking them because I feel like it's just going to dry out too much and it's going to form too much and you're going to have a lot of waste, but if you buy Edge Beef Jerky, there's definitely a The reason why the best restaurants do this, there is a reason. which I love and a lot of people like me love, it intensifies the flavor, makes it juicier and necessarily juicy, but it definitely makes for a more tender steak, so try Edge Beef Jerky if you can't, can't afford a Dedicated Meat Drager and You have a refrigerator at home, definitely give it a try, the most important thing is to make sure you have that air flow.

Make sure you put that little fan in there to keep that ear up anyway. It's probably a long video. Thank you so much. from watching it I hope you learned something please let me know in your comments your experience with dry aging uh if you have any tips or tricks on how to control that humidity and I'll see you next week for another video peace I have some meat to eat.