How to Dry Age Beef & Steak - Dry Aging 102
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How to Dry Age Beef & Steak
All the Prep Work for Dry Aging
If you’re planning on dry aging at home, the first thing you need to do is to find out if the meat has already been aged to make sure you do not over age it. Then you need to decide how long you are going to age it. 21-28 days is a good range for the first time you experiment with this, and you can go from there. You need to keep the beef at a consistently low temperature, so your fridge is probably your best bet. The issue you will have is it is going to take on the flavor of whatever else is in your fridge. Also, the ideal Humidity is 75-80%, and not many refrigerators are going to give you an option for that as they actually work to remove moisture. You also need to keep air moving in there; a possible fix for this would be to point a computer fan into a corner of the fridge to keep air circulating. I’d put my meat on a jerky rack with coarse salt underneath to absorb any off-odors or flavors and try to keep the fridge closed as much as possible to prevent temperature fluctuations.
How Long to Age the Beef/Steak?
How long you want to age the meat depends on a few things. How much meat you are willing to lose to dehydration and surface mold is generally the biggest one. As the meat sits in the open air, a few things are happening, some that can be seen and some that cannot be seen. The biggest and most obvious is the effect of dehydration of the meat. The 75-80% humidity is designed to control this and prevent what we would call case hardening in sausage. This is where the outside of the meat either dries or cooks too quickly, and it can no longer effectively pass heat into the meat or (and this is the more important factor for what we are talking about today) pass moisture out of the meat. If we put it in a box with no humidity control at all, the outermost sections of the meat would dehydrate too quickly, and we wouldn’t get the full benefits of dry aging.
Our Method & Experiencing Loss
We had some subprimal sitting in our dry aging chamber here, and the plan was to pull the first batch at 21 days, the second at 42, and then leave the last one in there as long as we could. Well, we got the first batch at almost exactly 21 days, and when we did that, we went from 13.7 and 13.4 lb of meat to 11.45 and 12.65, which was a 17% and 6% loss on them, as you can see there can be a wide range of expected product loss here. Now, as we have said before, in the first 21 days, the tenderness of the meat has improved as much as it is going to; tests have been done by major universities’ meat labs that have proven aging beyond 21 days does not have any noticeable effect on the tenderness of the meat. What happens after 21 days is all about the flavor profile.
So we also pulled a batch at closer to 60 days than 42, and this is where we saw some pretty significant jumps in product loss. We went from 12.15 and 15.75 to 9 and 11.05 lb, which was a loss of 26% and 30%. The trimming here was also significantly more difficult than it was in the first batch, so when we factor in the amount we had to trim off, we are looking at losses of 55%. So, is the taste change from 21-50 something days worth the extra 40% loss in product weight?
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Tex_77 Team Blue Power User Traeger Primo Grills PK Grills Canning Sous Vide Community Moderator Kansas
Jonathon I think you should do a comparison between wet aged and dry aged, and see what noticeable differences you can detect.
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Tex_77 Team Blue Power User Traeger Primo Grills PK Grills Canning Sous Vide Community Moderator Kansas
Jonathon I think you should do a comparison between wet aged and dry aged, and see what noticeable differences you can detect.
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Tex_77 So that was part of the plan, too many moving parts to keep track of it all. Trying “new” things during busy season is a baaaaad idea. We will be pretty much slowing down and only concentrating on keeping things moving here for the next few months. Maybe 1 or 2 experiments but even 3-4 hours in the kitchen is just making it impossible for me to keep up with everything else.
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Jonathon
so this strip is starting at 12.6 pounds going to try for 28 days this will be in a fridge not opened I’m going to get another strip tomorrow and bag it the same way and hold it for 28 days in a fridge that’s open and closed all day long.
