You Can Now Make Dry Aged Beef In Your Own Fridge
Dry aged beef is a style of preparing steak and other meaty dishes that you’ll typically find at high-end steakhouses and restaurants. Made by carefully controlling the temperature and humidity around large cuts of beef and storing it for several weeks or months, it’s a complicated process that rewards whoever utilizes it with incredibly tender and flavorsome steak at the end.
This method of preparing steaks has typically been considered to be impossible in a home setting due to the sophistication and precise requirements of dry aging. One company, however, has sought to change that by making a dry ager that you can utilize in your own fridge.
The device, called The SteakAger, manages temperature and humidity within itself to keep a piece of meat inside at optimal conditions for dry aging. It can hold up to 22 pounds of meat and fits in most refrigerators. The SteakAger even has Wi-Fi capabilities, allowing you to go on the website via a signal the device produces to monitor internal conditions.
We were able to get one of these SteakAgers to try out, with fellow Foodbeast and steak lover Chris taking charge for this test. He acquired a five-pound, bone-in ribeye from a local butcher and stored it in The SteakAger for 28 days to see how it performed.
Considering we’ve never dry aged a piece of meat before, we were a bit nervous about how it would turn out. It got even more nerve-wracking when we broadcast the fruits of Chris’s labor on a Facebook live stream.
Turns out it worked beautifully. The pericle (or outer mold layer that results from dry aging) was a bit thicker than anticipated, but with bigger cuts, we’d expect it to thin out. The steaks tasted just as amazing as they looked after being cut up, with some extra nutty notes and concentrated beef flavor coming from the dry aging process.
Overall, the SteakAger worked the way we expected it to, and is a fun way to try your own hand at dry aging a piece of meat.
I definitely want one of these to take my own steaks to the next level.
