Your Christmas roasts are here!
Here at Marczyk’s we take dry aging for granted, but what is it all about? Here’s the beef:
This is an old-world technique all but lost today. In the past, beef was slaughtered in a central area with good proximity to railway (like Denver or Chicago) and then it was shipped around the country whole and hanging to skilled butchers closer to the final point of sale. Remember that there was very limited refrigeration, and meat keeps very well when it’s whole. Anyway, this de facto dry aging was the norm 75 years ago and longer. Two technologies changed all this: sous vide or Cryovacing (Cryovac is like Kleenex—a brand name for the process of removing all air from a plastic bag and sealing it) and refrigeration. Centralized slaughter became centralized meat packing. Now beef is packed in plastic bags and boxed very soon after slaughter (2-4 days) then shipped in trucks and “aged” in the bag, aka “wet-aging”.
In the dry aging process approximately 20-30% of water weight is lost. The result of dry aging is a densely flavored (less water to dilute flavor) extremely beefy and tender piece of meat. In the dry aging process the natural enzymes are able to literally break down the muscle fibers and naturally occurring aerobic beneficial bacteria do their thing (not present in bagged meat—no oxygen). This is the meat you will only find at the very best of the very best steak houses and markets. Dry aged beef should never have been Cryovac-ed and should be cooked slightly differently than fresh or wet-aged beef (less water in the meat so it cooks faster). So there’s the science behind the taste. Dig in!
Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 3:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.