14 day dry aging complete

[wildfire00]

today was the last day of my first aged meat attempt. I have been dry aging a 10 lb Top Sirloin For the last 14 days.
well today was the day to slice the bad meat off of this beautiful piece of meat. In the pics you will notice how dry the meat looks, don’t worry this is supposed to happen. It’s all in the science. So I started cutting the dried meat off and discarded it. This can’t be used. Well not that I know of anyways. While I was trimming I cut a small piece of meat off, for two reasons. One was so that I could square the meat off and make proper size steaks out of everything else, and two was to see how this would taste. I added a bit of salt and pepper to this piece for a touch of flavor. But otherwise I tried to leave it alone so that i could concentrate on the meat.
So I trimmed the meat up, squared it off and now I am ready to slice it in to some great steaks.
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I was able to cut 6 steaks out of this chunk meat. I will be able to chop these steaks in half and share them with my wife or friends at the trailer or during a backyard bbq night. They were huge man. For instance if I buy un aged rib steaks from Costco they cost 25 bucks for 3 of them. I bought this huge ass piece of meat for 50 bucks and will have 10 aged steaks just as big but with a ton more of flavor. Now that’s saving some serious cash savings. Also to age it, it only cost me a few bucks for electricity to run my mini fridge. No other costs were involved.
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I cut way all of the “bad” meat off until I could see the nice red color of the beef underneath. What you basically want to do is just get rid of any fat, dark dried meat until it looks like a nice red roast. Once this is done you can mark it out for your thickness of steaks that you want. I do this by putting a small slice down the length of the meat, along the grain. I marked out 5 inch and a half steaks. I the n cut them and vacuum packed them to freeze.
This whole process took 14 days. I only needed a small fridge that was not going to be used for anything else. The fridge needs to hold a temp between 1-3 Celsius. I only opened the fridge every three days just to check on the meat and temp. This was to avoid letting the temp change and to avoid letting in any humidity. Only open the fridge briefly, do not leave open for a long period of time. I did not wrap the meat in cheese cloth as others choose to do. All I did was dry the meat off with paper towel before putting on an open rack with foil underneath to catch any drippings. This was just a precaution, but there was only one drip during this process. I also had to thermometers in the fridge just to make sure the temp was stable.

In the end, this process was fairly simple. You just need a fridge and patience. A very sharp knife and an empty stomach. This meat came out amazing, so deep with beefy flavor and tender as hell. I hope you want to try this yourself one day. It will save you a ton of cash and you will eat like a king.
Take care and keep the fire hot. to see more on the process, check out my site and look under the dry aging tab. www.wildfirecooking.com.

[SmokinAussie]

Well, It sure looks OK. If you used a cloth, would you still have to cut away what you call the "Bad" meat? .... And just one more question... how do you determine how much "bad" meat to cut off?

Cheers!


Bill

[wildfire00]

Hi Bill, the only real thing the cloth does it makes it so you dont lose as much meat. really there wouldnt be much of a difference in yeild so I decided to do it without, because it's not going to save me much.

when it comes to cutting off the bad meat, it just means to cut off what ever looks bad. you want to be left with meat that looks like you just bought it from the store. you dont want to leave any of the old fat or anything on the outside. you would probably cut off about a quarter of an inch of meat all around. but this depends on how long you are aging and how much the air penetrates the meat.

I hope this info helps and you should givre it a try sometime. just make sure you have a dedicated fridge to do it in.

take care and keep the fire hot.
www.wildfirecooking.com

[Frank Grimes]

What grade was the meat?

[landarc]

Use of the cloth does not prevent the formation of dried meat and fat. There is still going to be a fair amount of waste. This is why dry aged is so costly, the loss has to be accounted for.

[wildfire00]

All I was saying is that, the reason people use the cloth is because it will help the meat retain more moisture than without the cloth. As I said in my post, you will yeild a bit more meat. But the yeild will be so little, that there is no point in my opinion to wrap it..
Thanks for the feed back sir.
cheers.

[wildfire00]

the meat was Canadian AAA. Top Sirloin.

Cheers

[realspaazz]

I have never bothered to age the beef, but a whole choice top sirloin is the only way I have purchased steak for years. When I worked in a butcher shop in college, I watched what the owner took home for the grill... always sirloin or top sirloin. You can save a serious amount of money by buying the whole, whether it is top sirloin, strip loin, or boneless rib roast and slicing it yourself.

[Braumeister]

You might be interested in talking to this guy, he has stretched his aging out to 60 days. Yours is lookin good.


http://www.eggheadforum.com/index.ph...d=1&id=1093636