Dry Aged Ribeye

At Sam's club, I bought a whole, boneless, choice Black Angus ribeye. It was 17 lbs. I trimmed off the ends and then put it in one of my small beer fridges. When I was in high school, I worked at a high end grocery store that aged their own meats. Dry aging is the process of putting a large piece of meat in a temperature and humidity controlled environment for 28+ days. These were the best steaks I remember having. I purchased a aged, prime steaks from Whole Foods a few times. Once, the night I proposed to Lisa and I think one Valentines Day.  They are ~30 $/lb these days so not a normal purchase. The whole ribeye from Sam's is just choice quality instead of prime but only 8 $/lb.

I cleaned one of my beer fridges, added a fan, and two containers of salt to help control the humidity.

 

 

Above are weekly pictures of the meat. It was aged for 35 days. The outside dries out and forms a hard crust. This needs to be trimmed off to get at the goodness inside

 

After trimming about 3 lbs of crust away, I ended up with 7 nice, two inch thick Ribeyes. I ended up with only 55% of the original weight losing 3 lbs to evaporation and 3 lbs to trimming. 

To test the effect of the aging, I cooked two aged steaks (top) with one non-aged steak from the same piece of meat and a few taste testers. You can tell the contraction of the meat and the aged ones are brighter red. I cooked them for two hours with my new Sous Vide cooker. Sous Vide is French for under vacuum. Sous Vide is a cooking technique where the food is submerged in a vacuum sealed bag or ziplock bag at a precise temperature. This allows the meat to cooked to the exact temperature desired with no danger of over or under cooking it. I then just seared the outside in a pan for a few minutes and they came out beautifully medium rare all the way through.
 

 

All three of the steaks were excellent but very little flavor or texture change from aging. This may be partially due to too much airflow or too low humidity. Ideally, the bones would be included to protect the underside of the meat. I am trying a second piece of meat from Publix which has the bones on. I guess we need to eat more steak so I can clean out our freezer to try a few more times.