Moisture loss is one aspect that changes the flavor of dry-aged meat. For those who know their way around a kitchen, Flannery likens the process to reducing a stock to a demi-glace.
As more and more moisture evaporates, the flavor of the liquid is getting more and more concentrated. But chemical changes also affect the flavor. Muscle cells are made of lots of different materials, and chief among them are the proteins that enable the muscles to contract, and the molecules that fuel this process, such as glycogen, DNA and RNA.
During dry-aging, these large, flavorless molecules are broken down into smaller, flavorful fragments, explains McGee. And glycogen broken into sugars which are sweet. Dry aging transforms the texture of meat as well.
Entire primals, rather than single steaks are dry-aged, but to be a good candidate for dry-aging requires a good protective covering of bone or fat. Dry-aging is wasteful because every single side of meat that is exposed to air will be breaking down faster than the meat on the inside.
Ribeye is a great cut to dry age. Photo: Kevin Marple. The ideal length of time for dry-aging meat really comes down to individual taste. For Flannery, the sweet spot is around 30 to 35 days. And the longer you go, the funkier the flavor will get. When you go farther than that, and if you go really far out, like 60 to 90 days, you develop a serious blue cheese funk to it.
It will smell remarkably like blue cheese. Adam Perry Lang in his aging room. 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.
Even with completely random guessing, there's a 94 percent chance that at least one of those tasters should have gotten it right. In all, only two out of 12 tasters correctly identified the different steaks, a number still lower than you'd expect from pure chance alone. Again, steaks aged for seven days were ranked below the rest of the steaks for having stale flavors.
Finally, we tasted the fresh and five-day-aged steaks against steaks that were aged for 28 days in a professional aging cabinet. The difference was immediately, undeniably perceptible, with the true aged steaks offering a far more tender texture and a significantly deeper flavor. Frankly, I don't see how anyone could possibly confuse the two.
So there we have it. Some pretty darn strong evidence that the so-called "aging" of individual steaks in the refrigerator is entirely bogus. So why can't a steak develop good dry-aged flavor in the home kitchen? Again, the experts disagree. My personal theory, and one that is shared by a number of others, is that the flavor changes in dry-aged beef—those funky, nutty, cheesy aromas that develop—come largely from bacterial action on the surface of the meat.
This makes sense to me, as those flavors are most powerful near the cut edges of a steak, or near the bones, whose porous structure makes it easier for bacteria to get a foothold. The remainder of an aging primal is either covered in a thick layer of fat, or is made of muscle, which dries out and forms a cuticle that becomes impenetrable to moisture or bacteria after the first couple weeks of aging.
As a result, an aging primal's moisture loss will slow to a crawl after this cuticle is formed. In your fridge, you've got onions, cheese, vegetables, condiments. All that stuff that can give it off-flavors or worse, inoculate it with dangerous bacteria. This certainly rings true with taste test results in which tasters complained of off-putting, "old butter"-like flavors in fridge-stored steaks. Steingarten has another take, saying that he believes the flavor change to be largely enzymatic—that is, caused by chemical catalysts that are naturally present in the meat to begin with.
This is a difficult theory to test without an irradiated piece of beef and the sterile environment of, say, a microchip manufacturing plant. Unfortunately we can't even keep the darn dogs out of Serious Eats World Headquarters, much less the microscopic bugs.
An even more important factor is the obvious: surface area to volume ratio. With a large primal cut of the type that is used for aging in a steakhouse or specialty meat purveyor, the amount of meat you actually lose to moisture loss or hyperactive bacteria is—at least ratio-wise—quite small. 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. Once the aging process is completed, the dried-out layers around the exterior are cut away, leaving you with a beautifully aged, edible dark-red piece of meat. Those who enjoy meat are really starting to better understand the benefits of dry aged beef. Once cooked, the molecules inside the beef begin to wake up with heat and that smell wafts up to our noses and senses.
This is where dry aging takes a step beyond cooking just a regular steak. The meat is softer, making it easier to cut through, and easier to digest. And the taste? Dry aged steaks will cook faster because there is less moisture.
0コメント