This video is sponsored by Crowd Cow. It might not look like it, but this, in my opinion,
is some of the finest food on earth. So what even is dry aged beef? Well, before vacuum
packing revolutionized the meat industry in the 1960s, dry aged beef was previously known
as "beef," just normal beef, or maybe "well-hung" beef. Yes, that compound adjective has a few
very old meanings in English, but one of them describes old meat — desirably old meat.
Hey, that's what they call me.
See, when you slaughter an animal in a pre-industrial context, you either have to cut it up and
eat it right away or you're going to have to let it sit around for a while before you
eat it, for a couple of reasons. First, there's rigor mortis. When any animal dies, when you
die, your muscles go limp at first, but then a couple of hours later, your muscles go hard
and your body locks up stiff. It's one of these very creepy things about death that
they very rarely get right in the movies. Rigor has to do with the release of calcium
into the intracellular fluid, and once it sets in, it takes about three days to go away,
during which time the meat will be very hard to cut, and it can be hard to eat depending
on how you cook it. It's maybe not such a big deal with small, tender animals like birds
or rabbits, but with sheep or goats or cattle, it's a really big deal.
So that's one reason to let an animal sit around for a while after slaughter before
you eat it. Another reason is maybe you and your family are not physically able to eat
it all at first. I mean, a cow is a big thing, and if you can't eat it all at once, you're
going to have to preserve it some way to keep it from rotting. Preserving meat takes time.
In some climates, your only option might be cutting the meat up into little bits and packing
it in salt. But if you live in a place where you can put the meat somewhere cool and dark
and breezy and humid, but not too humid; well, meat can last a very long time if you just
kinda hang it up in the air and leave it — for weeks, for months even.
I would bet you money that the way that human beings first figured this out is that they
hung up the carcass after slaughter to let the blood drain out, and then something happened.
They had to go to war against the neighboring tribe of hunter gatherers, and they came back
several days later to that tree where they had hung the carcass to let it bleed out,
and they were expecting it to be rotten and gross and disgusting, and it wasn't.
Why wasn't it foul? Well, field trip to Dovetail, easily the finest upscale restaurant in Macon,
Georgia, where I live. Chef Brad Stevens' food here would be just as popular in a much
bigger, hipper city and cost three times as much. Cooking under Stevens here as my buddy
Davis Wells, a fine young chef in his own right and a huge dry aging nerd. He ages a
lot of meat himself, and he's up all the science.
"If you desiccate the exterior of a large piece of meat, most bacteria need water to
survive. Once you pull the water out and get the exterior basically below, say, 0.7 water
activity, most bacteria just can't survive anymore. Then some molds takeover, and because
they're penicilliums, they're literally antibiotic."
Pretty cool, though it is trickier than it sounds. For example, the combination of windiness
and humidity has to be just right. If the air is too wet, you're going to encourage
some pretty awful surface bacterial growth.
"Too low, and you dry it too fast on the outside, and you can get what's called case hardening,
which is a similar thing that happens in salami, where the exterior dries too fast and so the
interior moisture can't escape anymore. That's bad and can lead to spoilage."
You got to figure that, millennia ago, people who just happened to have the right atmospheric
conditions where they lived simply noticed that they could hang their meat and it wouldn't
go bad. What's more, they found that if they hung their meat for a really long time, not
only was it just not bad, it was arguably better than fresh meat.
Let's test that. Here are two very nice ribeye steaks. The thicker one was dry aged 45 days.
The thinner one was not. Oil, salt, and pepper, and I'm cooking them in separate pans. I'm
shooting for a medium rare on both. Take them out, rest, carve, and here are my tasters:
my lovely wife, Lauren, and Handyman Dwayne. He's helping us out with some stuff around
the house right now, and he gets steak.
"Very good, extremely tender."
"It's delicious."
"More like a filet mignon kind of tender."
That's the dry aged steak they're talking about. They instinctively reached for that.
Now here's the "normal" one.
"That one's less tender."
"Less tender."
"It's good, but I like that one better."
Indeed, I thought they were both great, but the dry aged steak was, to me, far superior
— much more tender, with a strong nutty roasted flavor that I just loved. The normal
steak had a brighter, fresher flavor for sure, which was nice. But, well, the proof is in
the leftovers. Dry aged steak is on the right.
Why the difference? Well, I'll tell you right after I tell you where I got those steaks.
I got 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 regularly sells it. Crowd Cow is an online marketplace
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You can learn all about the folks that you're buying from and supporting, and then you can
get some unbelievably tasty meat in the mail. These steaks came packed on dry ice, so they
were rock solid preserved. And hey, the packaging is that new-fangled foam made out of corn.
You literally just dissolve it in water instead of throwing it away.
"Oh, it's running away."
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So, why? Why does dry aged beef taste and feel so different? Well, check out this 45
day dry aged prime strip loin that chef Wells is breaking down at Dovetail.
"Immediately, you can smell on your fingers a certain nuttiness, almost cheesiness, and
that comes from penicillium molds that 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 kinds
of preserved or aged meats. Side note to a side note, most people who think they have
a penicillin allergy actually do not. Talk to your doctor about it. Anyway, a lot of
what makes that meat tastes so different is simply water loss.
"With 45 days, you'd expect to lose 20 to 25% weight. With that, you get concentrated
marbling down here. This looks, not quite like Wagyu, but certainly better than your
average prime New York strip that you'll find at Costco or Sam's Club."
This is one reason why dry aged beef is so rare and expensive these days. Meat is sold
by weight, and this weighs less than it used to. The processor has evaporated off money,
and what's more, the desiccated exterior, the bark — that's really tough. It has to
be trimmed off. That's even more loss, though you can use it for some things.
"Some people grind it into burgers. It adds a lot of dry aged pow, oomph, to a ground
beef product."
Note to self. Now, why is moisture loss good? Aren't we always struggling to keep our steaks
as juicy as possible?
"Well, moisture loss is going to concentrate flavor, but a dry aged steak will have less
moisture loss on a grill because it's already lost that moisture."
Speaking of cooking, check out what happens when Davis throws this under their broiler.
He advocates simple cooking of dry aged beef. You've paid a lot for that flavor; why would
you want to cover it up with smoke or a sauce?
"One of the benefits of dry aged beef is it will crust faster because there's less moisture
to boil off. You'll start to get a nice sear surprisingly quickly. Another thing is that
the residual glycogen left in muscles are broken down by enzymes into glutamate, which
is one of the fundamental components of monosodium glutamate or MSG. You get not only sugars
that are more concentrated, but you develop literal glutamic acids that will boost flavor
more."
Hence that more roasted taste that I noticed in my dry aged steak. Now, Chef Wells here
is not just spouting chef mythology. The basics of dry aging have been investigated by food
scientists for years. What's more, studies have found that aged beef tastes juicer even
when it technically contains less juice. This may be because the fat-to-water ratio is greater
and rendered fat coats the mouth better than water does. It may also be due to reduced
water-holding capacity. Aged beef is more tender, and therefore it breaks down more
readily as you are chewing on it, thereby releasing more juice into your mouth. All
the juice in the world in a fresher steak is not going to help you if it's locked inside
tissue that you're swallowing whole. Why exactly is aged beef more tender?
"Enzymes are breaking down the collagen casings that are around each of these muscle fibers
here, which is really what we think of when we think of a tough piece of meat. And so,
it's functionally pre-digesting them."
Those enzymes are naturally present in all muscle tissue. They're in your muscles right
now, breaking your muscles down. The difference is you're still alive, and you're eating protein,
which is then replenishing your muscles through a process known as protein turnover. The animal
dies — that process naturally stops. Enzymes keep breaking down the tissue, and it is not
replenished, hence tenderization. This happens in the meat over the course of the first couple
of weeks, whether you are dry aging or wet aging, just letting the meat sit in plastic,
in its own juices. This is how most steak cuts, in my part of the world at least, are
aged — if they are aged at all.
It's a whole lot 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 fridge, maybe send it on a refrigerator
truck out to the stores and it ages on the truck. It's real, real easy. There's no evaporation.
All of the water is trapped right in here. There is some moisture loss — it's what's
known as purge. That's the juice that just comes spilling out of the package when you
open it up, but the processors don't care about that moisture loss, because they've
already sold you that moisture. This was sold by weight, and the moisture was in there.
You've already paid for what you are just sending down the sink, potentially. Though,
I think you should save it for a sauce. That's what I usually do. Davis, like a lot of chefs,
is not a fan of wet aging.
"Generally, the threshold for wet aging is four weeks, up to six weeks. After that, you
get really strong metallic nickel, iron, and sourness coming in."
It gets to tasting like blood, basically. Plus, you don't get the additional flavor
effects of the beneficial molds and yeast and bacteria. The whole point of wrapping
this up in plastic is to keep that stuff out and also to deprive what microorganisms are
already in there of the oxygen that they need to flourish. Dry aging, in the right conditions,
discourages bad microorganisms and encourages good ones.
"Various molds and bacteria, lactobacillus, penicillium, camemberti, penicillium roqueforti,
again, those are things you might know from cheese making that are also naturally present
in meat, that not only add flavor and cheesy nuttiness to it..."
...but they can help with texture, too. Scientists used to think that wet aging and dry aging
resulted in the same exact level of enzymatic tenderization, but as this very recent paper
shows us, there's a mold called thamnidium on dry aged beef.
"Which can actually reincorporate new enzymes, so prolong the enzymatic tenderization aspect
of it."
So if anybody tells you that wet aged beef is just as tender, you tell them about thamnidium.
Anyway, let's wrap this up with some common questions. Can you dry age meat yourself at
home? Well, famously, Alton Brown popularized a method on his show Good Eats where you just
leave a steak uncovered in the fridge for a couple of days. Brown himself has subsequently
acknowledged this only achieves moisture loss, very little enzymatic tenderization, and none
of that cheesy microbial flavor development that you get with real dry aging. It doesn't
do very much.
I haven't played with it yet, but if I was going to dry age beef myself at home, I would
get one of these fancy new bags. They're just permeable enough to let out the right amount
of water. Some independent research has shown this gets you results comparable to traditional
dry aging, but with much less trimming loss. The desiccated bark layer is not as thick.
Lastly, the big question: How long should beef be dry aged? Opinions diverge quite a
lot, probably in part because the results are going to differ a lot depending on the
specific conditions of your drying chamber. The same length of time might do different
things in different places.
"If it's a strong microflora climate in the aging chamber, 45-50 days is great. Past 90
days, it can get a little texturally dry, almost to say like a Serrano ham texture — not
so much flavor, but you do get the sourness from lactobacillus coming in and a pretty
significant funk at that point."
Some people like the funk, and that funk is generally going to be most apparent on the
outside crust of the meat, that bark. Another thing that people will do with the trimmings
is throw them in a pan with some water and render all the fat out. The water just keeps
anything from burning and it makes sure that all the fat is getting cooked. You then boil
the water out and there you have pure rendered trimming fat.
Here's a little steak that I cut from the end piece of that loin at Dovetail. It's the
part that was just below the bark, so it's functionally more like a 90 day steak than
a 45. It's very dry. Now I will baste it in my rendered trimming fat. The funky cheesy
notes are generally most apparent in the fat because fat absorbs aromas created by the
molds, and because the fats themselves break down into more aromatic fatty acids as they
age. Slice that up and indeed, texturally, this has become something other than steak.
It's really charcuterie, and the flavor? Well, let's see what handyman Dwayne thinks.
"That's incredible. There's a little bit of a flavor in there. I don't know what. It's
not bad."
"It's the age."
"Yeah."
"It's like cheese."
"Which I'm not used to. It's very good."
Definitely not for everyone, but it's definitely for me. Now, if dry aging beef is so great,
why don't people do it to the meat of other animals? Well, they do. That's a conversation
for another day.