Things like “dry aged” steak.
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Aging, or dry aging, isn’t the same as spoiling.
Food spoils in an uncontrolled environment, left to rot with all bacteria, including bad bacteria, getting all into the food and growing, and the “bad bacteria” tends to out-compete the good bacteria in these situations, rotting the food and making them dangerous.
Humans over the course of the last 10,000-100,000+ years have figured out certain situations can actually control for bacteria, allowing *GOOD* bacteria to flourish and help in the aging process without letting the bad bacteria in. The common example of this is cheese and yogurt, which is just dairy products with good bacteria (or similar) going to work and outcompeting any small amounts of bad stuff.
In the example you gave of dry aged steak, The steak is butchered in a safe and clean environment, and cuts of beef are great for this process because the fibers of the meat are tightly packed and dense, so bacteria cannot penetrate into the whole meat as easily. This is why you can also eat fresh beef raw or rare with little danger if prepared safely, because the bacteria is only on the surface and can get killed by the sear or the acid in the case of a tartare. When you dry age, you put those cuts of steak you butchered in a clean enclosed environment safely away from bad bacteria as much as possible, in a cool and dry environment. This limits bacterial growth, and only small amounts of bacteria go to work on the meat, usually only “good bacteria” overall, and it breaks down the meat over the course of 30-50 days which helps make the meat so much more tender. Then, when you go to cook that steak, the chef will usually remove the outer-layer that may have dangerous bacterial growth, leaving a safe steak underneath in the core that you can then cook and enjoy.
In short, the muscle in beef is too dense for the bacteria to penetrate far enough to cause problems, but you’ll still get that “crust” on the outside where they were able to.
In addition to all the comments about steak, when you age cheese, it’s either covered in a layer of wax to keep microorganisms out, or by a rind (parmegiano reggiano for example; you might be able to find parm rinds in a grocery store deli dept) made of good microorganisms to keep the bad ones out. That, in addition to being kept in a cool environment, gives the cheese the desired flavour without making it unsafe to eat.
The outer layer of the steak does have to be cut off, so some parts of the meat are moldy. It just doesn’t penetrate deep enough to affect the whole steak.
It does. Just spoils in the right kind of way. Kinda like cheese is milk that spoiled correctly.
People just found, through trial and error, ways to have meat spoil in such a way that is not harmful and makes the meat taste better.
Some ways include protecting me meat from intrusion of bacteria and fungi with salt or plastic and storing it in a dry environment, so the top layer becomes dry and less penetrable for harmful bacteria and fungi.
But other ways actually encourage those growths, just like mold on cheese.
Let’s use aging cheese (I’ll use caerphilly as an example, but the process is the same with a lot of different types)
You’re culturing the milk with bacteria that’s food safe so it outcompetes occult strains of bacteria that isn’t food safe.
Then you’re scooping out the curd which is basically making all the proteins clump together, a form of removing water that would allow bad bacteria to grow.
Then you’re salting it (drawing out water and creating an environment that’s hostile to bacteria on the surface), pressing it (further squeezing out water), then putting it on the bench for the exterior to dry and turning it twice a day so it dries evenly.
While that happens, you wash the outside of the cheese with salt water to wash off any spots of mold that might start growing while that happens. Then when its reached about a month of aging, you cut the hard rind that’s formed on the outside off and eat the interior.
Cheesemaking is a way of preserving milk. Other stuff like wine is a way of preserving fruit by using a specific yeast culture to outcompete other cultures that are trying to eat the sugars. The aging of wine requires a stabiliser to kill the yeast culture when the sugar is eaten, otherwise it will keep eating and turn into acetic acid (vinegar). The aging of wine is less for preservation and more to let the harsh flavors mellow out over time though.
That’s the basics of aging. Stuff’s going to be growing anyway, so you’re making sure that whatever’s growing is something safe for you to eat.
Like a lot of people have said, it’s about getting “good” organisms to thrive and keeping “bad” ones out of the process.
For instance, I make homemade mead. It’s simple: honey, water, and yeast. But what kind of yeast? Bread yeast? Jock itch? Obviously, jock itch is probably not the kind of yeast we want. So I sterilize all of my equipment with food grade cleaners to get rid of “bad” yeast and then use nutrient blends to help “good” yeast grow and make alcohols for mead. This is what happens with aged food: everything is cleaned up so that the aging organisms we want can be added without getting the ones we don’t want in the way.
It’s all about the conditions. Temperature is a large factor in things as bacteria only grow in a certain temperature range, but other factors like humidity play a role, depending on the food and what you are trying to do to it.
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