rmg wrote:
> No the subject line is not a pun on middle age.
>
> I'm curious as to whether anyone has ever dry aged their own beef. I live in
> an urban apartment and I love my occasional rib eye.

Funny you should ask. Wednesday's radio program was all about this. I
mentioned it and we got lots of phone calls about the whole subject.

Freshly killed beef doesn't taste very good and is on the tough side.
Aging permits the enzymes naturally present in the meat to "digest" it a
bit to make it more tender and improve the flavor. That applies to
either wet or dry aging. Dry aging confers an additional benefit. It
lets some of the moisture dry out of the meat and, so, concentrates the
flavor while permitting the enzymes to continue tenderizing.

The meat I last used was a cryopack rib section (the whole 11 to 14
pound piece still in its wholesale packaging) from Costco that I store
in my fridge for a couple weeks just as I buy it. I usually cut anywhere
from 21 to 28 steaks from each piece, so you have to like beef a lot or
have a big party planned.

What this *is not* is the packages in the meat counter of most
supermarkets where they've cut larger pieces into small steaks or roasts
and they're sitting on plastic trays with one of those absorptive
"diapers" to soak up the blood. You can't wet age them. The meat will
simply spoil. You can dry-age them briefly - two or three days - but
that's all.

Cryopacked meats have a shelf life (refrigerated) of something over a
month from pack date, on up to about 45 days. I store them unopened in
my fridge for two weeks.

Then I take them out of the packaging, rinse them off and dry with paper
towels. I put the whole piece of meat on a rack like people use for
cooling cakes and put that on a baking sheet (restaurant half sheet pan)
with sides. I loosely drape a clean paper towel over the meat and put it
in the fridge for another week or so. No seasoning, no marinades. No
messing with it. Plain meat. As long as it's up off the pan so air can
get all around it, it won't spoil any time soon. The last one I did went
almost 20 days dry aging before we ate the last of it and it still
smelled like good, clean meat. Some of the surface will dry and get a
bit hard. The usual thing is to cut that off, but I don't bother. I've
never been bothered by the dried part after cooking.

I cut steaks as needed from the big piece and put it right back in the
fridge. It can *never* be put into a sealed container for more than a
couple days before you'll smell spoilage proceeding.

Here are the cautions:
1) if the meat is sitting on a solid surface rather than a rack, it will
spoil in a few days.
2) the meat must be kept cold all through the aging process.
3) make sure the meat isn't sitting under anything that will drip on it.
4) dry-aged meats don't render much juice, but make sure any tiny bit of
juice can't drip on any other food.

Dry-aged meats are commercially available, but they're very pricey. I
paid $15 a pound for rib eye steaks recently to do a comparison. Mine in
the last batch were every bit as good, maybe better.

I have a new one wet-aging even as we speak.

Pastorio