What’s the deal with aging beef? Why does it improve the taste to hang it for a few days but it spoils if it stays a little too long in the meat department at the grocer’s? What exactly is happening to that side of beef hanging in the slaughter house? Are our taste buds trained to like meat that’s a little rotten but not a lot rotten?
Aged beef,or hung beef,goes through a natural tenderizing process.
The box beef that is delivered to the super markets hasn’t had enough aging to be naturally tenderized.
Of course any meat that is hung too long is inedible ,but keeping it in a temperature controlled locker prolongs the time it can be held.
Any privately owned butcher shop which employs REAL meat cutters,and not the chain saw hackers at the packing companies, has a side of beef hanging in a corner of the cooler for the private supply of the staff-----and the owner.
The color of a steak tells the srory-------if it’s bright red-------f’get it!
Or so it has beeen described to me.
Happy enzymes to you!
This is one of those issues that always bugs me in the US. Basically, there are three types of beef in the world that are good to eat: Scottish, Argentian and Kobe. The reason is that (as Ezstrete said) they know how to hang their beef.
If you order well-done beef from any self-respecting French restaurant, they will sneer and scoff and naturally assume that you are a barbarian American. All meat should be cooked ‘bleu’ and any attempt to do otherwise is desecration. Unfortunately, the highly litigious system in the US makes this virtually impossible for restaurants.
Try unpasteurised cheese, as another example. That is truly wonderful but is virtually impossible to source except at regional cheese factories in France. It is non-existant in the US.
I was always told that aging beef was a process that offset the effects of rigor mortis. This biological function is initiated very soon after death but the effects are relaxed after a period of time (depending on the quantity and type of meat). If you hang beef, it will become more tender after a while because the cell walls are broken down and this counteracts the effects of rigor mortis.
I was going to type “When you talk about aging, hung beef, I thought you meant me … 43 years old but still going strong, hubba hubba” but then decided not to!
Er, are you trying to say that it’s impossible to get a rare steak in the US? Not true at all. I’ve never been in a restaurant that refused to serve beef as rare as I wanted it - cold in the middle, if that’s what I asked for.
Certain chain restaurants nowadays do refuse to serve burgers with any pink in the middle. I’ve yet to see this practice in any self-respecting restaurant, however. It’s only the chains who have more lawyers than chefs who practice such despicable acts.
This one, unfortunately, is true. <sigh>… I gotta go eat cheese in France one of these days.
Burgers are different than steaks when it comes to serving them rare.
Rare steak is very unlikely to have e. coli because the bacteria grows on the surface (and can’t get inside). Browing the surface of the meat kills the bacteria.
However, ground beef mixes the bacteria throughout. For that reason, you can’t get rare hamburgers any more.