Last May, my husband and I, with our daughter, took a drip down to the Big Easy and while this is another story altogether, one particular event during that trip led to this post. We stopped by Rouses one day for some fruit (since all we had been eating were lunches and dinners out in the French Quarter) as well as some crawfish they were selling for cheaper-than-dirt. Inside the market near the meat department, there was a glass case full of sub-primal cuts of beef dry-aging to various lengths of time. Before this, I had paid no mind to anything that said "dry-aged" because frankly, I had no idea what it even meant. Of course I've seen this term on menus in fancy restaurants though generally speaking, we don't eat much steak outside of home.
What caught my eye was mostly the price tags - $200-300+ for each cut, which I now realize is very cheap compared to the dry-aged steaks high-end meat purveyors sell such beef at. At the end of our trip, we went home, with the dry, jerky like meat stuffed to a far corner in the back of my mind.
In the past few months I've done extensive Googling of steaks, dry-aged, "wet-aged", cooked, uncooked (this is a very, very weird past time of mine). After hearing people rave about how amazing dry-aged beef is, I decided to give it a shot. I found a few, rather vague guides to dry-aging at home, but this particular
page told me everything I needed to know. I have a spare, brand-new full-sized Samsung fridge sitting in my garage, which gave me the perfect environment to do this in. Although Kenji suggests using a desk fan inside for airing the meat, I decided against cutting a hole into the seal of the door to do this...
I
really,
really wanted a rib with the fat cap intact but this is all they had at the Handy Market. The butcher was particularly happy when I asked him not to trim anything, to which he said, "this is the easiest prime rib I've ever sold!". So, this being the best I could do, I bought 3-ribs worth which came out to be about 8.5 lbs (originally I asked for 4-rib because I swear prime ribs are
not this big!!! Every time I see them at Costco, they're really very small and the bones are small). Since the rib bones were way larger than I remember, and the meat a bit "saggy", I made rather (note:
extremely) immature jokes to friends about how my cow was old and had very saggy... you get the idea. I wrapped the rib in a layer of paper towels to soak up excess moisture since water + no air = rotting meat.
I stuck it in the fridge. On day 2, I actually decided not to wrap the meat again purely out of anxiety because I was so worried it would rot (which does happen if it doesn't air properly against the paper). For the first few days, I took it out as fast as I could for a picture, then ran it back to the fridge. In hindsight, this probably wasn't the best food-safety practice but hey, it's an experiment.
Ok, giving you fair warning here: it gets kind of nasty. So, if you don't want to see desiccated beef, scroll straightttttttttt down to the end of the post for the good stuff!
It's not going to look any better. Or smell any better.
This was somewhere around day 10. There wasn't a whole lot of change after this point aside from the fact it gets a bit drier looking. I also had a full week where I wasn't home much during the day, so I didn't get pictures between here and day 28.
So, in the Serious Eats guide, Kenji says to buy the rib with the fat cap, something I wasn't able to do, because if you don't you'll be lamenting the loss of the spinalis muscle, which I did. At this point, I'm going to say,
butchering is freaking hard! You'd think that you can just take a knife and lob it through the meat between the ribs right? NO. There is a bone between the rib bones that is there solely to fuck your life up. It's nestled in tightly against the meat and ligaments of the adjacent ribs so even cutting around it was a pain. I became so frustrated with it at one point I almost drove the meat back to Handy Market to beg the butchers to slice it up for me. I did successfully stab myself a couple of times during this fun-filled ordeal.
The yield was 2 massive, 2 1/2" thick bone-in ribeyes and one small runt steak that was almost impossible to trim because of the way the rib was cut originally. Each steak is enough for a light meal for 2. I salted ahead of time, and dropped on some black pepper.
I followed genius-chef Marc Forgione's method of cooking his steak - rendering out the dry-aged fat with some rosemary, thyme, garlic, butter(?), spooning it onto the steak, then pan-searing and finishing it off in the oven. There wasn't really a given recipe, since he serves this in his restaurant, I just read an article about how he does and winged it! I'm sure his is many times better but this one came out pretty darn tasty too.
After 8 minutes or so in the oven at 350° and 10 minutes resting time, the steak was a near perfect medium rare. I cut the steak up into thick slices. The outside of the steak was crusty and flavorful, the combination of the rendered fat, aged beef, and hot sear yielded a fabulously deep, beefy taste. Though I first cut it with a chef's knife, I was using a butter knife for the meat when I ate it - that's how tender it was! The aging process allows the fibers within the muscle to break down through enzymatic action, creating a much more tender piece of meat than you could get otherwise.
Another thing that varied greatly from non-aged beef is the lack of juice - the steak wasn't dry, it was exactly like a filet mignon without the accompanying lack of flavor - it just didn't seep out oodles of juice after you cut it up like other steaks. I think it could easily be made better with a little au jus or even a light demi. And, despite being rich in taste, it was never overwhelming.
*
BEWARE! The aged parts around the outside of the steak had, as everybody said, a strong, nutty, cheesy flavor I had a hard time with. If you make sure to trim it all off, you probably won't have this problem.
