What is dry aged beef? Since when is drier meat good?

This video is sponsored by Crowd Cow. It may not seem like it, but in my opinion, this is one of the best foods in the world. So

what

is dry-

aged

beef

long before vacuum packaging revolutionized the

meat

industry in the 1960s? Dry-

aged

beef

was previously known. like beef, just regular beef or maybe well-hung beef, yes, that compound adjective has some very old meanings in English, but one of them describes old beef, desirably old beef, that's

what

they call me. Look

when

you kill an animal in a pre-industrial context. You have to cut it up and eat it right away or you will have to let it sit for a while before eating it for a couple of reasons: First, there is rigor mortis

when

any animal dies, when you die your muscles become flabby. first, but then a couple of hours later, your muscles tighten and your body becomes rigid.

It's one of those very creepy things about death that is rarely portrayed well in movies. Rigor has to do with the release of calcium into the intracellular fluid and once. It hardens, taking about three days to disappear, during which time the

meat

will be very difficult to cut and may be difficult to eat depending on how you cook it, perhaps not as important with small, tender animals such as birds or rabbits. but with sheep, goats or cattle it's a big problem, so that's one reason to let an animal sit for a while after slaughter before eating it.

Another reason is that you and your family may not be able to physically eat it all at first. I mean a cow is a big thing and if you can't eat it all at once you will have to preserve it somehow to prevent it from rotting. Preserving meat takes time in some climates, your only option may be to cut the meat. into little pieces and pack it in salt, but if you live in a place where you can put the meat in a cool, dark, breezy and humid place, but not too humid, the meat can last a long time if you just hang it in the air and leave it for weeks for months.

I would even bet you money that the way humans figured this out was that they hung the corpse after sacrifice to let the blood drain away and then something happened, they had to go to war. against the neighboring tribe of hunter-gatherers and they returned several days later to that tree where they had hung the corpse to bleed out and they expected it to be rotten, disgusting and disgusting and it wasn't because it wasn't, it's very

good

, an excursion to fit easily at the best upscale restaurant in Macon, Georgia, where I live. Chef Brad Stevens' food here would be just as popular in a much larger, modern city and cost three times as much.

Cooking with Stevens. Here's my friend Davis Wells. an excellent young chef in his own right and a huge dry aging nerd, he ages a lot of meat himself and is aware of all the signs, if you dry the outside of a large piece of meat, most bacteria need water to survive , so once you remove the water and get the exterior basically below, say 0.7 water activity bacteria, most of the bacteria just can't survive anymore and then some molds take over and as they are penicilliums, are literally antibiotics, quite

good

, although it is more complicated than it seems, for example, the combination of wind and humidity has to be right.

If the air is too humid, you'll encourage some pretty terrible surface bacterial growth and you dry it too quickly on the outside and you can get what's called hardening, which is a similar thing that happens with salami, where the outside dries too quickly and, therefore, the interior humidity can no longer escape and that is bad and can cause spoilage, but you have to imagine that millennia ago people who happened to have the right atmospheric conditions where they lived simply realized that they could hang the meat and not It spoiled and, what's more, they discovered that if they hung the meat for a long time not only was it not bad, but it was possibly better than fresh meat and let's try that.

Here are two very good rib eye steaks, the thicker one was dry aged and aged for 45 days, the thinner one was no oil, salt and pepper, and I'm cooking them in separate pans. I'm looking for medium-rare on both, take them out, rest and cut and here. It's my tasters, my lovely wife Lauren and the handyman Dwayne, he's helping us with some things around the house at the moment and he makes a very good steak, extremely tender, it was delicious, more like a filet mignon than anything tender, that's the dry steak they are. Speaking of which, they instinctively reached for that.

Now here is the normal one. It was less tender. Less tender. Well, but I'm dying better. In fact, I thought they were both great, but the dry-aged steak was far superior to me. Much more tender with a strong nutty flavor. flavor which I loved, the regular steak had a fresher and brighter flavor for sure which was nice but hey the proof is in the leftover dry aged steak on the right so why the difference ? Well, I'll tell you right after I tell you where I got those steaks, I bought them from the sponsor of this video. crowd cow Dry aged beef is very hard to find where I live, there is no store that sells it regularly.

Crowd Cow is an online marketplace for all types of high-quality meat and seafood. It's a way to connect with farmers, fishermen and ranchers who are raising meat the right way. Grass-fed beef. Wild seafood. Pork and pasture-raised poultry. Wagyu from Japan. Really special things. You can learn everything about the people you are buying from. and support, and then you can receive incredibly tasty meat in the mail. These steaks came packed in dry ice so they were preserved like a rock and hey, the packaging is that newfangled foam made from corn, you literally just dissolve it in water instead of throwing it away. away, you can get 15 off your first order using my link in the description crowd cow.com slash regucia plus you'll save an extra five percent on everything if you become a crowd cow member. use my link in the description and your membership is free thanks cow crowd so why does dry aged beef taste and feel so different?

Check out this 45-day dry-aged prime rib that Chef Wells is breaking down in the dovetail. You can immediately smell a certain nuttiness, almost cheese on your fingers. and that comes from penicillium molds which are actually very similar to molds in the cheese making process if you're wondering. Yes, people with penicillin allergies can have bad reactions to all types of preserved or aged meat, but side note for most people. Those who think they have a penicillin allergy don't actually talk to their doctor about it; anyway, much of what makes meat taste so different is simply water loss.

In 45 days, you'd expect to lose 20 to 25 percent of weight, and with that there's concentrated marbling down here, so this isn't much like wagyu, but it's certainly better than the typical New York strip that You will find it at Costco or Sam's Club. This is one of the reasons dry-aged beef is so rare and expensive these days. The meat is sold by weight and weighs less than it used to. For the processor, the money has evaporated and what's more, the exterior is dried out, the rind is very hard, it has to be trimmed, so it is an even greater loss. , although you can use it for some things.

People grind it to make burgers, it adds a lot of dry aged flavor to a ground beef product. On a personal note now, why is moisture loss good? I mean, aren't we always striving to keep our steaks as juicy as possible? Well, moisture loss goes to concentrated flavor, but a dry-aged steak will lose less moisture on the grill because it's already lost that moisture, and speaking of doneness, look what happens when Davis throws this under the grill. He recommends simply cooking dry-aged beef, he's paid a lot for. for that flavor, why would you want to cover it with smoke or a sauce?

One of the benefits of dry aged beef is that it will crust faster because there is less moisture to boil, so it will start to sear nicely surprisingly quickly. The point is that the residual glycogen left in the muscles is broken down by enzymes into glutamate, which is one of the fundamental components of monosodium glutamate or msg, so not only do you obtain more concentrated sugars, but you also develop glutamic acids. literals that will further increase the flavor. That more grilled flavor I noticed in my Chef Wells dry-aged steak here isn't just chef mythology. Food scientists have researched the basics of dry aging for years.

What's more, studies have found that aged beef tastes juicier even when it technically contains less. juice, this may be because the ratio of fat to water is higher and the extracted fat coats the mouth better than water. It may also be due to a lower water retention capacity. Aged beef is more tender and therefore breaks down more easily when chewed. thus releasing more juice into your mouth, all the juice in the world in a fresher steak won't help you if it's locked inside the tissue you're swallowing whole, and why exactly is it aged beef? The tenderer enzymes are breaking down the collagen envelopes that around each of these muscle fibers here, which is really what we think of when we think of a tough piece of meat and therefore functionally predigesting them, those enzymes are present in naturally throughout the muscle tissue, they are in the muscles at this moment breaking down. your muscles decrease the difference is that you are still alive and you are eating proteins which then replenish your muscles through a process known as protein turnover, the animal dies, that process stops naturally the enzymes continue to break down the tissue and it is not replaced, for Therefore, it softens.

This happens to meat over the course of the first few weeks, whether you are dry aging or wet aging, simply by letting the meat sit in plastic in its own juices. This is how most cuts of meat are aged in my part of the world, at least if they are aged it is much cheaper for the processors they don't need a special room to hang the meat they just package it up and put it in the refrigerator maybe they send it in a refrigerated truck to the stores and it ages in the truck it is very very easy there is no evaporation, all the water is trapped here there is some loss of humidity, it is what is known as purging, it is the juice that spills out from the package when you open it, but the processors You don't care about that moisture loss because they already sold you that moisture, this was sold by weight and the moisture was there, you already paid for what you're potentially sending down the sink, although I think you should save it. for a sauce, that's what I usually do.

Davis, like many chefs, doesn't like wet aging. Generally, the threshold for wet aging is four weeks to six weeks after that, you get a very strong metallic nickel type and acidity. It basically tastes like blood, and you don't get the additional flavor effects of beneficial molds, yeasts, and bacteria. The goal of wrapping this in plastic is to keep that stuff out and also starve the microorganisms that are already there. the oxygen they need to flourish dry aging in the right conditions discourages bad microorganisms and encourages good ones, various molds and bacteria, so lactobacillus penicillium camemberty penicillium rook40 again, those are things you may know from cheese making and They are also naturally present in the meat which not only add flavor and a hint of cheese and nuttiness, but can also help with the texture.

Scientists used to think that wet aging and dry aging resulted in exactly the same level of enzymatic tenderization, but as this very recent article shows us, there is a mold called femnidium in dry-aged beef that can actually reintroduce new enzymes, so it prolongs its enzymatic tenderizing aspect, so if someone tells you that wet-aged beef is just as tender, tell them about feminium anyway, let's finish with some common questions. Dry-aged meat yourself at home, well, kind of like the famous Alton Brown popularized a method on his Good Eats show where he simply leaves a steak uncovered in the refrigerator for a couple of days.

Brown himself has subsequently acknowledged that this only achieves a loss of moisture, very little enzymatic softening, and none of that microbial cheesy flavor development that you get with real, not very dry aging. I haven't played with it yet, but if I were drying aged beef at home, I would buy one of these fancy new bags. are permeable enough to let outthe correct amount of water. Some independent research has shown that this provides comparable results to traditional dry aging, but with much less trim loss, the dried bark layer is not as thick, and finally, the big question is: how long should it last?

Opinions on dry-aging beef diverge quite a bit, probably in part because the results will differ greatly depending on the specific conditions of your drying chamber. The same period of time can do different things in different places if there is a strong microflora climate. the 45 to 50 day aging chamber is excellent after 90 days, it can get a little dry texture-wise, almost like a serrano ham texture, not as much flavor, but you do get the kind of acidity of the lactobacillus coming in and a pretty significant funk. Period, but some people like funk and that funk will generally be most evident on the outer crust of the bark meat, so another thing people will do with the trimmings is toss them in a pan with a little water and take them out. all the fat. the water just prevents anything from burning and makes sure that all the fat is cooked out, then you boil the water and there you have the pure fat rendered by trimming here is a small filet that I cut from the dovetail end of the tenderloin, it is the Part of that was right under the crust, so functionally it looks more like a 90-day steak than a 45-day one.

It's very dry and now I'm going to baste it with my rendered trimming fat. The original cheese notes are generally most evident in the fat because the fat absorbs the aromas created by the molds and because the fats themselves break down into more aromatic fatty acids as they age, cut them and, in fact, from the point of view from the texture, this has become more than just a steak, it's really charcuterie and the flavor, well let's see what handyman Duane thinks, that's amazing, there's some flavor there, I don't. I don't know what I mean, it's not bad, it's the age, yes, it's like a cheese that I'm not used to, it's very good, definitely, not for everyone, but it definitely is for me now, yes beef Dry aged is so good, why aren't people? make it with the meat of other animals well they do it that's a conversation for another day