It's interesting, I don't think that I actually
like it more than the 28 day.
You like that one better?
When you age things, there's peaks and crescendos,
and valleys, right?
It hits its plateau.
It changes flavor over time,
and I think that this is just one of the cycles
where like, the sour notes are kinda becoming prominent.
I'm interested to see what will happen with the--
180.
I think it's going to be completely different.
We are in downtown Manhattan,
we are at Delmonicos Restaurant.
Three months ago we came and tried a 90 day dry-aged steak.
I didn't really like it very much to be honest with you,
I thought it was a bit sour tasting.
We are here to try a 180 day dry-aged steak.
They've aged that long because that's how many years
they've been in business.
So this is sort of a celebration of the restaurant.
Let's see what happens after another three months.
Has it changed it?
We're gonna find out,
and I'm gonna let you know all about it.
(fast pace jazz music)
So in the last video, if you saw the room,
you saw that I was commenting on how clean it was,
and what I meant by that was, it had a very subtle flavor.
Some rooms you walk in and it just
knocks you right over the head, that funky dry-aged smell.
The smell of aging beef.
But, the room here was very clean, and you could see
there wasn't a lot of build up of bacteria on the outsides.
That's the really fascinating thing about aging beef,
it goes through these peaks and valleys of flavor,
of sourness, or sweetness,
of profundity of blue cheesiness, of steeliness,
of all of these flavor influences.
But they don't all come around at once,
that's the beauty of aging.
It's very much like wine.
I mean, there are times when you should
drink a bottle of wine,
there's times when it's not ready to drink,
there's times when it's too late,
and I think we're finding the same thing
through these processes of aging beef for a long time.
(fast pace jazz music)
This is the 180 dry-age, USDA prime rib steak of beef.
(fast pace jazz music)
This is an enormous piece of meat,
I don't know what it weighs,
but it's got to be at least two pounds.
Wow.
Right off the bat, those pungent notes of aromatics,
those things that I smelt when I walked into that
aging room three months ago are completely apparent,
and just the aroma, and right in the middle of it,
so I have high hopes that this is going to be
profoundly aged.
Mmm.
Absolutely spectacular.
I mean, I'm sort of a little gobsmacked by it.
It's one of the beefiest tasting pieces of meat
I've ever eaten, and I don't really expect that,
once you get over 90 days, I kind of find that those flavors
are really different.
Now I'm going to get into my favorite part,
generally the spinalis.
(laughs) Did you see that?
That was like, you could just basically pull it off.
I mean, I did use a knife.
It's got the tensile strength of a filet or something,
it's really tender.
It hasn't lost the moisture that I would normally
associate with a long aging.
Wow.
It's got the flavor of Parmesan.
It's really interesting.
You know, normally you get those blue cheesy notes
in dry-aging, but it's a saltiness to it.
It's not as gamey, it's not as abrupt,
but it still has this really sort of strong residual flavor
after you've eaten it.
Let's try the outside caps, which
definitely are tougher to cut through,
and in my experience, you know, they're not as tender,
which is the reason they're sort of used for other things.
Wow.
That's the most intense thing yet.
Because of course,
the outside cap is what was exposed to the dry age room,
so that really has the intense blue cheese flavor,
much more than the inside.
Although that has penetrated all the way through,
but I have to say, there's nothing like the interior
of this steak, it has like, such a great, like, texture.
It's so supple, it's almost like,
I wouldn't say chicken breast,
because there is some bite to it,
but it's got a real tenderness that you don't really
associate with rib steaks usually.
So what's the take away here?
Well, in all the years I've been eating at Delmonicos,
this is the best steak I've ever had here.
And that's saying a lot, I love this restaurant,
I eat here all the time.
It's interesting how I experience this kind of
lull point with the 90 day, really wasn't what I liked,
but then when you just let it
sit in there for another three months,
and it just gets all of these positive traits,
and kind of loses the ones that I didn't like.
So that's kind of what separates the art
and the science of dry-aging, it's like,
you can set up all of these parameters, humidity,
ventilation, heat, light, all of those things,
you take care of those,
but then there's the unexpected component,
and you just don't know what's going to happen, because,
you know, this is nature taking its course, right?
You're controlling it in some way,
but you don't really have control over
what's happening inside the meat to that degree.
And obviously it's just about trying
and learning and tasting, and you know, for my money,
this is worth the money.
Absolutely spectacular piece of meat.
Well thank you very much for watching.
I'm going to sit here and polish off
the rest of these steaks,
and we'll see you on the next episode of The Meat Show.
(dramatic chords)