Can You Dry Age Ground Beef

Cooking Skills

Y'all Can Dry-Age Steaks in Your Fridge

Acquire how to deepen your steak's flavors at home with cheesecloth, a fridge, and time.

Living in Montana has spoiled me on steaks. With so many ranches within 100 miles of me, I not only take my choice among several local purveyors, only I'm oftentimes able to buy direct from the rancher. (By and large, that rancher is Oxbow Cattle Co. in Missoula.)

Such high-quality meat demands proper grooming and cooking. By and large, I've stored steaks in my fridge in the butcher paper or the cream container they came in. But I learned I could be replicating the dry out-aging process—usually the purview of fancy steakhouses—in my ain fridge. I idea my steaks were succulent before, but dry-aging has taken them beyond that baseline.

Why dry out-aging? Experts know it makes beef more tender and flavorful—butchers aren't simply hanging quarters of beefiness in refrigerators for aesthetics. When beef is exposed to air at low temperatures, its flavors become more than concentrated as musculus protein transforms into amino acids and peptides. Enzymes break downward connective tissue during this process as well, making each bite more tender.

By contrast, wet-aged beef—the kind that's sealed in plastic—isn't losing as much moisture. Then if a home melt wants the benefits of dry out-crumbling from a regular, packaged steak, they'll take to replicate it in their kitchen. The technique is best practical to any cut of steak on which you'd want a browned, seared chaff: tenderloin, porterhouse, rib-eye, pinnacle loin, and strip steaks.

"Surface drying that happens over a few days in the refrigerator will greatly improve browning, and thus flavor," explains Paul Adams, scientific discipline editor at America's Test Kitchen.

Here'southward how to exercise it: Pat the steak dry out, then wrap information technology loosely in cheesecloth. (Home refrigerators are less humid than the walk-in coolers at a butcher shop, so the cheesecloth guards against as well much moisture loss.) Place the steak on a wire rack set in a blistering canvas, and so set it in the coldest office of the refrigerator, which is by and large the everyman shelf, toward the back.

Now, the waiting game. The remainder in dry-aging in a abode refrigerator is to maximize the effects of drying without introducing leaner that could spoil the meat. While beef stored in a fridge specifically designed for dry crumbling can safely sit for a month or more, Adams advises more circumspection in a abode refrigerator. Temperatures to a higher place normal refrigerator standards—which could occur if the fridge door gets opened frequently, say by party guests in search of beer—would increment enzymes' activeness in breaking down tissue, but would also potentially hasten the growth of bacteria.

Based on America's Test Kitchen methods, I've settled on three days in the refrigerator for my small tenderloin steaks. Tasted alongside their non-dry-aged components, the steaks that had been aging for iii days in my refrigerator had a noticeably more satisfying chaff, creating greater dissimilarity between the seared outer layer and the tender, succulent interior. Such a short period of dry-crumbling didn't much affect the steak'due south interior, but the improve sear lonely makes the footstep worth information technology. When cooking such beautiful beef, every detail counts.

Adams also says I could employ the refrigerator dry-crumbling process to some other Montana delicacy: venison, elk, and other game meat. In fact, those meats might benefit from an even longer aging period in my refrigerator.

"Dry out-aging venison and the similar volition give the same protein breakdown and wet loss effects," he says. "Fat breakdown will be less noticeable because at that place's less fat, and that should permit you to leave information technology longer without starting to become rancid tastes."

I'm eager to try this process with some of the venison steaks in my chest freezer, stored there after my husband'due south hunting trip last fall. Non-Montanans, though, might have to do a bit more legwork to find that raw textile.

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Source: https://www.americastestkitchen.com/articles/3537-how-to-dry-age-steaks-in-your-fridge