Its no mystery why a steak at a great steak house tastes so good. Its not what they cook it on, its the size and quality of the steak. Its all comes down to a thick well marbled steak. Hard to duplicate with the average thin sparsely marbled supermarket steak. Nice thick well marbled steak from your local butcher or buying a nicely marbled sub primal and aging at home, wet or dry, and your there at 1/4 the cost. Who has tried it and how was it?
Glad to see you jumping in with a topic I know is near and dear to your heart.
My experience has been strictly with dry aging, 21 days, in a humidity controlled enviroment. You have to be a true carnivore to see a dry aged steak, prior to trimming, and still find it palatable.
While it’s certainly not necessary for a great steak, having a comercial broiler at 1200± degrees certainly helps crust the salt coating and sear the meat.
I have a infa-red outdoor grill that does heat higher and more evenly than most grills. I had prepped a few beautiful bone in rib eyes a couple weeks ago, only to find I was out of gas. I have a grill in my stove but even with my commercial exhaust hood, cooking steaks always sets off the smoke alarms, so I was forced to pan fry.
There just wasn’t enough heat to properly melt the coarse salt, and the result was a very salty rib eye. Trust me there are far worse things in life, but I was still pissed. Lol
I do both wet & dry aging in the spare fridge.
IMHO, key to wet & dry aging is starting out with a good sub primal with lots of marbling and also one that is firm with the factory cryovac tight to the meat and little if any blood sloshing around inside.
Wet is simple, 28 days from the pack date inside the factory cryovac. Definitely increases tenderness but not really a flavor changer.
Dry is also easy, remove from bag, rinse off under cold water, place on a wire rack over a sheet pan with several inches of ventilation under it and on the bottom shelf of the fridge it goes. I am not into the funky flavor so 28 days or less does it for me. To me, the dry aged has a more velvety texture on the tongue & the sometimes serum/iron/bloody flavor is never there.
I have also done a combination wet/dry where about a 10 day dry finish removes the serum/iron/bloody flavor without the bark waste that comes with a long dry age.
I have heard commercials on the radio about a company “Solaire” that makes infra-red grills that are supposed to be extremely high quality and get very hot, $1500 & up…but probably last for ever and fully repairable if something does break.
My all time favorites are the ceramic cookers, in my case the Big Green Egg. With good lump charcoal, 1200 deg is very realistic and the flavor from the lump really adds a lot. Also great year round smokers. Will have to do a thread on them soon.
