I heard a report on the radio the other day about some special kind of beef, yadda yadda, and the seller said they had aged it for a long time – thirty days.
I’ve heard of aging beef (and other meats) all my life but never thought about how you do it. If I buy a nice steak, for example, and put it in my freezer for thirty days, then it’s thirty days older, but I doubt if it’s “aged”. OTOH, if I put that steak in the fridge for thirty days – I don’t believe I’d want to eat it any more. It certainly wouldn’t be preferable to it’s condition when it was fresh. Any cholesterol-loving gourmands out there to give me the straight dope?
Aged beef hasbeen hung in a cool place to mature as an entire carcass - if you do the same thing with a cut steak, it won’t work because the surface area to volume ratio is way different; it will just dry out, plus the cut surfaces will have been seeded with bacteria.
Ahhh, finally, a topic on which I am very qualified to respond, as I worked for several years for a gourmet meat company. Not to put too fine a point on it, but “aged” beef is beef that has begun the rotting process. As Mangetout said, the sides of beef are hung in a cool house for various ammounts of time. What happens is that the fibers of the meat begin to break down as bacteria does it’s work. In extreme cases, the outer layer of the sides of beef is trimmed and discarded because it actually has become rotten- but the stuff under it is extremely tender and tasty. Many people express distaste at this idea- and yet don’t think twice about where the holes in Swiss cheese come from. Go to dinner at Ruth’s Chriss or Mortons and you’ll be able to see what a big difference there is between what is for sale at the local market and true aged beef. Aged is 200 times better- and about 6 times as expensive. It’s well worth it, however.
Yeah, it’s true - aged beef is partially rotted beef (done under safe controled conditions of course). When some of my relatives lived in rural Alberta and hunted geese, they sort of aged them before eating them too. They hung them up by the neck, and left them there for a week or two. Although there might have been some mild exaggeration, I was told that when the carcass had “rotted” or aged enough for the neck to come apart where the string was and the bird fell to the floor, it was ready to eat. They cooked it real good though… and even then came close to food poisoning several times. Wild game like geese tends to be tough, so it helps to have some microscopic buddies soften it up for you first.
so why is it more so much more expecive? is it THAT much more dificalt to prepare meat for ageing that you charge, say, 6 times what non aged meat costs.
Negatory. I recently saw a cooking show about a famous NY steak house that showed racks and racks of individually cut steaks aging. They said they start with extra large steaks because they shrink so much, it’s very wasteful. They said they’d like to age them even longer than they do, but they’d be unable to make a profit, they’d have to sell the steaks for $50 a pop to break even.