Title: Can I Dry Age Beef At Home? | The Food Lab
Headings: Can I Dry Age Beef At Home? | The Food Lab
Can I Dry Age Beef At Home? | The Food Lab
An Aging Primer
The Experiment
Cooking Qualities
The Taste Test
Why Not?
Other Aging Options

Content: Examine the evidence, step into the kitchen, and get to the bottom of the mystery myself. That's exactly what I did . The Experiment
To start my testing, I decided to follow the basic Cook's Illustrated /Alton Brown protocol: take fresh steaks, wrap them in several layers of cheesecloth or paper towels, place them on a rack in the back of the fridge, and let them sit for up to four days. For thoroughness' sake, I repeated the experiment a total of four times (twice with ribeye steaks, twice with tenderloin steaks) with six steaks in each batch aged for nine days, seven days, five days, two days, one day, and zero days. I knew that in order for the taste test to be fair, the steaks would all have to come from the same steer, so I cut up a couple of boneless ribeye roasts that were donated by our friends at The Double R Ranch into identical steaks along with a couple of whole tenderloins purchased from my local Fairway butcher counter. But there was immediately a problem: how do you age some steaks and keep the others fresh? The only way I know of to keep steaks fresh for a significant period of time is to freeze them, but this posed problems of its own. A fresh ribeye steak.