Love me tender
In the butcher’s lexicon, the word “aging” is a fancy term for “controlled rotting.” Most people ignore that truth, but the fact remains: Fanatical foodies pay big to slide their teeth through buttery hunks of old beef.
So why do people pay a prime penny to steakhouses and specialty butchers for beef that’s been aged past normal standards for consumption?
“Decay is the breaking down of the tissue, so it really is the cause of tenderness in the meat,” said Bill Alles, managing partner at Churchill’s Steakhouse, downtown Spokane’s newest high-end restaurant.
The son of a butcher, Alles helped develop the restaurant’s hybridized style of aging that employs both existing methods – wet and dry aging – to prepare the restaurant’s USDA prime meats.
During wet aging – the newest and most common way of aging – fresh meat is packed in plastic Cryovac containers, which trap the liquids. As it ages in the plastic, the beef becomes more tender, but doesn’t lose any water weight.
This is in contrast to dry aging, where evaporation causes a loss of 4 to 19 percent water weight.
Churchill’s uses both methods. After leaving the beef in the Cryovac plastic for 21 days, resident meat cutter Bob Fish washes the meat and wraps it in cheesecloth for dry aging.
“This wet aging has some aging characteristics of breaking down tissue, that is advantageous,” Alles said. “But the problem is that it doesn’t shrink moisture. The liquid, the water weight that is inside that piece of meat, stays in that piece of meat under a wet-aging scenario.”
Wait – more water means juicier meat, right?
Consider this analogy: Take a glass of red wine and pour a glass of water into it. The wine will have more volume, but less flavor.
Dry aging is like taking the water back out of that glass of wine. As the moisture seeps out of the beef, the flavor becomes more concentrated.
“The longer we let it sit in a dry-aging atmosphere, the more intense that flavor’s going to become,” Alles said. “There’s some coloration change that takes place, because of the oxidation to the exposed muscle, but the flavor profile is substantially enhanced.”
All of Churchill’s steaks are aged using this process and range in price from $26 for a 12-ounce top sirloin to $51 for a 28-ounce porterhouse steak.
Spencer’s For Steaks and Chops in downtown Spokane, for instance, serves primarily wet-aged beef – and the price difference is evident. The restaurant currently offers a 16-ounce wet-aged New York Steak for $39.50. A 20-ounce, bone-in dry-aged New York is $77.95.
The price difference is because the dry-aged beef loses about 20 percent of its weight due to evaporation, executive chef Jonathan Holden said.
The restaurant tends to sell more of the wet-aged beef, he said. The bone-in New York is the only dry-aged steak they are offering right now.
“People like what they’re accustomed to,” Holden said. “A lot of people haven’t had the chance to try dry-aged beef. … It can tend to have a real earthy, kind of musty aroma.”
Long before aging became the gourmand’s catchphrase, dry aging to a certain degree was, and still is, the traditional way to treat beef. All meat has to be aged a bit to soften it up to be handled.
Scott Byers, owner of Crown Foods, 1402 W. Northwest Blvd., is an old-school carcass hanger.
“We bring the beef in, age it for 14 days before we cut it and wrap it,” Byers said. “It doesn’t necessarily need to go any longer than that for the product that we’re getting in. Much more than that and the customer’s going to take a cutting loss because of throwaway. And we’re trying to prevent that.”
That’s one of the side effects of aging beef: waste. The exposed layers often need to be thrown away, like moldy cheese.
Say you want to try aging beef at home. If you’re dealing with what butchers call sub-primal cuts – which can then be broken down into steaks – there’ll be a layer of fat that helps protect the meat as it ages, which means less throwaway, Byers said.
But, he added, “If they’re taking individual cuts to age them, they’re wasting their time. … If they take a steak from Safeway and try to age it for 14 days, I guarantee it’s gonna be throwaway material.”
Aging a steak would be like aging a slice of cheese. Once you cut away the mold, you have nothing left.
Some people prefer not to age steak more than what’s necessary to process it. Steve Egger of Egger’s Meats, 5613 S. Perry St., considers it a matter of taste. Aged beef tends to have a more gamey flavor, and some people may not like that.
Plus, there’s the whole rotting thing.
“How can I say this,” he said. “You kill something. You let it sit. And it gets older. Yeah, I’m assuming it’s gonna get more tender … But the key factor that is causing that, is that it’s getting older and it’s breaking down. Yeah, is that rotting? Is that decomposing? Is that what I want to eat?
“I’ve never gone to a school, I’ve just been born and raised in this business,” he said. “But in my opinion, that nice fresh piece of meat tastes a little better than that piece of meat that’s breaking down and decomposing … Brandy, whisky, aged wine. Yeah. Definitely, I think there’s a personal preference in the aging of beef.”
Flavor that filet
Here are some compound butter recipes to pair with your steak, no matter how it’s aged.
Spencer’s Steak Butter
From Jonathan Holden, executive chef at Spencer’s For Steaks and Chops in downtown Spokane.
1 pound salted butter at room temperature
1 1/2 teaspoons Coleman’s Dry English mustard
1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
1/2 teaspoon granulated garlic
Whip the butter with electric mixer until light and creamy. Add remaining ingredients and blend well. Keep in refrigerator and spoon about 1 tablespoon onto each steak just before serving.
Yield: 24 servings
Nutrition per serving: 138 calories, 15 grams fat (9 grams saturated, 98 percent fat calories), less than 1 gram protein, less than 1 gram carbohydrate, 41 milligrams cholesterol, no dietary fiber, 183 milligrams sodium.
Roasted Red Pepper and Smoked Paprika Butter
From “Steaks, Chops, Roasts, and Ribs,” by the editors of Cooks Illustrated magazine (America’s Test Kitchen, 2004).
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
2 tablespoons very finely minced jarred roasted red bell peppers (about 1 ounce)
1 tablespoon minced fresh thyme leaves
3/4 teaspoon smoked paprika
1/2 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper
Using a fork, beat all of the ingredients, including ground black pepper to taste, together in a small bowl until combined. Just before serving the steaks, spoon about 1 tablespoon onto each and serve.
Yield: 4 servings
Approximate nutrition per serving: 106 calories, 12 grams fat (7 grams saturated, 96 percent fat calories), less than 1 gram protein, less than 1 gram carbohydrate, 31 milligrams cholesterol, less than 1 gram dietary fiber, 318 milligrams sodium.
Lemon, Garlic and Parsley Butter
From “Steaks, Chops, Roasts, and Ribs,” by the editors of Cooks Illustrated Magazine (America’s Test Kitchen, 2004).
4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
1/2 teaspoon grated lemon zest
1 tablespoon minced fresh parsley leaves
1 medium garlic clove, minced to a puree or pressed through a garlic press (about 1 teaspoon)
1/2 teaspoon salt
Ground black pepper
Using a fork, beat all of the ingredients, including ground black pepper to taste, together in a small bowl until combined. Just before serving the steaks, spoon about 1 tablespoon onto each and serve.
Yield: 4 servings
Approximate nutrition per serving: 104 calories, 12 grams fat (7 grams saturated, 96 percent fat calories), less than 1 gram protein, less than 1 gram carbohydrate, 31 milligrams cholesterol, less than 1 gram dietary fiber.