Wet aging allows us to have a lower price point for our consumers while still delivering on taste and quality. Bottom line, both methods work well for adding tenderness and flavor. We chose to use wet aging to extend shelf life and have a fair price for our consumers.
Post chemo left my body super low in iron so steak remains in my diet. Grass-fed, no added hormones and most importantly affordable. Eat better for your body people! One of the changes we made was to use more grass-fed and finished beef in our cooking. We decided to give Pre a try, and we are so happy with the quality and taste of the meat.
Buying from Pre gives us peace of mind and we feel confident knowing that we are using a product in the top of its class. I'm from Wisconsin so a huge steak lover. This is some of the best beef, I've experienced and I've had beef around the world. It's a must try, and you'll understand what I mean. I sear both sides and "in-between" in a very hot small Lodge cast iron skillet.
I use a spatter guard. Then I place the skillet in a degree oven for between 2min. Perfect medium minus filets. The truth is, all meat benefits from some amount of aging. Most of the beef we consume has been wet aged — a process where the meat has been sealed in a bag to retain its moisture. The chemical transformation that happens to beef occurs regardless of whether the meat is left outside of a bag to dry age or inside a vacuum-sealed bag to wet age.
The difference comes in the flavour. Moisture is pulled out of the meat. The fat portion retains more water than the lean portion, causing the lean muscle to shrink around the fat; the fat becomes more pronounced, thus giving the beef more flavour. Bacteria formed in the aging process produces a robust flavour profile that is highly desirable. Both the mold, and the flavour profiles, are indeed similar.
The key to dry aging is consistency — controlling the decomposition so that the meat ages, not rots. It all comes down to three key factors: air flow to help form a crust, humidity control to slow down the migration of moisture and keep natural juices from running out, and temperature control to stop the meat from spoiling.
Think of it like a bone shield. What this also tells us is that in the timeframe we're talking—up to a week or more—small molecules do indeed penetrate deep into a steak. Is it possible that some of those molecules might be affecting flavor?
And what about that dried out edge? How would that affect texture and flavor? A quick gag-inducing sniff test proved the worst in the case of the nine-day aged steaks: They were all rotten. Even cutting into them revealed a core of edible meat only a few eighths of an inch thick. I threw them out, rather than risk the health of my tasters.
I cooked the remaining steaks in a large cast iron pan, using an infrared thermometer to ensure that the surface temperature of the pan was identical before placing the meat inside it. Normally, I'd cook my steaks by flipping them frequently in order to promote faster, more even cooking throughout the meat. In this case, however, I stuck to a single flip in the middle for the sake of easy repetition and accuracy.
Take a look at the steak on the right versus the one on the left below. This happens for two reasons. First, more moisture can cause it to buckle and bend when that moisture suddenly starts to leave thanks to the heat of the pan , causing certain areas of the steak to shrink faster than others. Small perturbations in the surface of the meat are amplified. Second, because those browning reactions collectively known as the Maillard reaction take place when proteins and sugars are heated to high temperatures—generally in excess of degrees or so.
Meat contains a lot of water, which acts as a built-in temperature regulator, preventing the meat from getting too hot until it mostly evaporates. So for completely fresh meat to brown properly, this surface moisture must first be driven off. Meat that has spent time in the refrigerator, however, already has a dry surface, allowing it to brown more efficiently.
Slow browning is not the end of the world—just by letting the steak sit a few seconds longer on each side, I easily compensated for the discrepancies.
Even more interestingly, the biggest difference in browning was between the non-aged steak and the one-day aged steak. After that, there wasn't much difference, no matter how long the steak was aged. Indeed, subsequent testing showed that even an overnight 8- to hour rest on a rack in the fridge is sufficient to create a dry enough surface on the meat for optimized browning.
Certainly much better browning. The tender issue is debatable. The drier exterior seemed to make the interior feel moister and more tender. But we did not taste blind in this case. Other than browning, I noticed no major differences in the way the steaks cooked. The real surprise came after I weighed all of the steaks post-cooking to see how much moisture they lost from their original state.
Well, would you look at that? What this means is that whatever moisture loss occurs in the very outer layers of the steak due to dehydration during aging would have been lost anyway during cooking. It also indicates—even before tasting—that any arguments that rely on the concentration of meat flavors due to moisture loss are most likely bogus, since the final moisture loss is identical in all the steaks across the board.
How would they stack up in actual blind tastings? I performed two separate taste tests, using two separate groups of tasters to gather my results. The first taste test was a simple blind side-by-side ranking, in which I asked tasters to taste all the meat, give me notes on relative tenderness and flavor, and rank them in order of preference. Between the steaks aged for zero, one, two, and five days, there was no discernible pattern to their preferences. The one result that did show a definite trend was that the seven-day aged steak was consistently ranked at the bottom in terms of flavor, with tasters citing "old refrigerator" and "stale" flavors.
So there is indeed something to Mark Pastore's claim that meat will pick up the flavors present in a refrigerator. For the second round of taste tests, I went one step further, performing a triangle test, the standard test when rigorous results are needed for sensory-based studies.
To perform the test, a subject is presented with three sample. Two of the samples are identical, while the third is different. The taster's only job is to determine which of the three samples is different from the other two. The test was given to 12 different tasters.
And guess what? For steaks aged five days or less, tasters could not identify which steak was aged and which was fresh. There was literally no detectable difference in the cooked steaks.
In fact, out of the first seven tasters, none of them were able to correctly identify the odd-steak out. The enzymes change the texture of the meat, and they redefine its flavor.
Dry-aged steak produces the most tender beef available. Along with that, the flavor changes are substantial. Dry-aged flavors tend to be stronger. The downside to dry-aging in addition to the time it takes is that you lose a lot of meat. The loss of moisture reduces the mass of the beef overall.
Also, the aging process ruins the surface of the meat. The surface has to be trimmed away, and this adds to the loss of mass. Ultimately, this process drives up the cost per pound of the steak. Despite the price, many people rave about the flavor of dry-aged meat and are willing to pay the premiums. Wet-aging has been around for less than 60 years or so. It only became an option after the mass development of plastics meant easy production of the bags required for wet-aging.
In order to wet-age steak, the beef is cut and portioned. It is then immediately placed in vacuum-sealed bags.
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