For most foods, especially meat, the experts usually say you’re supposed to throw it out after about a week at most. So how can you ignore all that and stick a chunk of meat in your fridge for sometimes upwards of 60 days and it’s “fine dining?”
And how does eating meat that old not at least give you food poisoning?
In: Other
Stuff that makes you sick likes warm, wet and non-salty environment. The dry aging is a controlled environment that removes moisture, the outside of the meat forms almost a crust or scab. There may be some bad stuff there but it can’t get inside the meat, and the outside is trimmed off before cooking.
There’s a key difference between beef and meats like chicken that makes this possible: the bacteria that attack beef pretty much all stay on the surface. This is why you can eat rare steak but not rare chicken, and it’s also what makes dry-aging viable. Since all of the dangerous parts are on the outside, you can just cut that off after it’s done aging and still have an edible piece of meat.
This is also part of why dry-aged beef is as expensive as it is. Part of that is simply the time and storage space it takes up, but you also lose a significant portion of the beef in the process.
Proper dry-aging is done in a temperature and humidity controlled environment. Moisture is drawn out of the meat to concentrate flavor.
Simply leaving the meat out or in the fridge is different. According to Livestrong.com : “The USDA notes that there are two types of bacteria: pathogenic bacteria and spoilage bacteria. Spoilage bacteria causes the food to start smelling and tasting funny, but consuming it won’t harm you. Pathogenic bacteria, on the other hand, is harmful bacteria that doesn’t affect the taste or smell of the food in any way but can cause you to fall sick.”
Pathogenic bacteria, including E. Coli, salmonella, listeria, and others, thrive in warm, humid environments, which are prevented (along with spoilage bacteria) by the temperature and humidity controlled environment in which meat is dry-aged.
All the bacteria and other bugs that would do this to you need moisture to grow. Dry-aging and salting remove that moisture, which allows it to stay good much longer than unpreserved meat because the bacteria can’t live in the environment.
To give you an idea of how much salt we’re talking about, salted meat would typically be boiled when preparing to make the salt bearable and soften the meat, which would be full of crystallized salt at that point
The action of enzymes within the primal can not be overlooked as well.
Drying out a steak in your fridge has nothing on a properly dry aged primal from which you cut a New York strip or a ribeye.
As others have pointed out, controlling the temperature and humidity is needed. The reason it is needed is to give the enzymes time to do their job without the meat going bad in the meantime.
Latest Answers