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

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 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 gonna 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 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 could 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 gonna have to preserve it in 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 kind of 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 is 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 on all the signs if you desiccate the exterior of a large piece of meat most bacteria need water to survive and so once you pull the water out and get the exterior basically below say 0.7 water activity bacteria most bacteria just can't survive anymore and then some molds take over 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 and that's that's bad and can lead to spoilage but you gotta 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 and 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 and let's test that here are two very nice rib eye 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 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 was delicious more like a filet mignon than kind of tender that's the dry age steak they're talking about they instinctively reached for that now here's the normal one i was less tender less tender good but i'm dying better indeed i thought they were both great but the dry age 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 so 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 for all kinds of high quality meat and seafood it's a way for you to connect with farmers fishers and ranchers who are raising meat the right way grass-fed beef wild-caught seafood pasture-raised pork and poultry wagyu from japan really special stuff 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 newfangled foam made out of corn you literally just dissolve it in water instead of throwing it away you can get 15 off your first order by 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 thank you crowd cow 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 kind of smell on your fingers a certain nuttiness almost cheesiness and that comes from uh 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 meat but 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 taste so different is simply water loss with 45 days you'd expect to lose 20 to 25 percent weight and so with that you get concentrated marbling down here and so this looks i mean 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 so 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 age pal boom to a ground beef product note to self now why is moisture loss good i mean 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 and 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 so one of the benefits of dry aged beef is it will crust faster because there's less moisture to boil off so 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 so 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 age steak 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 juicier 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 and why exactly is aged beef more tender enzymes are breaking down the collagen casings that around each of these muscle fibers here which is really what we think of when we think of it 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 kind of 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 kind of 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 so lactobacillus penicillium camemberty penicillium rook40 again those are things you might know from cheese making that are also naturally present in meat that not only add flavor and kind of cheesy and 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 femnidium on dry aged beef which can actually re-incorporate new enzymes so kind of prolong the enzymatic tenderization aspect of it so if anybody tells you that wet aged beef is just as tender you tell them about feminium anyway let's wrap this up with some common questions can you dry age meat yourself at home well kind of 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 and 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 micro flora 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 kind of sourness from lactobacillus coming in and a pretty significant funk at that point but some people like the funk and that funk is generally gonna be most apparent on the outside crust of the meat that bark so 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 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 and 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 duane thinks that's incredible there's a little bit of a flavor in there i don't know what i mean it's not bad it's the age yeah it's kind of 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

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 669,354

Rating: 4.9526849 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: EgZeQbwcmz4

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ericbm2]

This just has me thirsting for a "wtf is cheese?" video.

[u/Dexav]

It's just old beef!

[u/horseradish1]

My only disappointment is that when he asked the question of dry aging at home, he didn't bring up Alex French Guy Cooking's series on YouTube where he dry ages a steak in his fridge to basically butcher standards.

[u/harlotstrumpet]

This video made me wonder if the reason I have a bad reaction to cheese is due to my penicillin allergy and not that I'm Lactose tolerant

[u/tnick771]

I disagree with his theory of how we discovered it. Hanging food from trees has been a long standing method to deter pests and scavengers from stealing food. It was just a natural process.