Title: Dry-Aged Beef: Your Complete Guide | Art of Manliness
Headings: A Guide to Dry-Aged Beef
A Guide to Dry-Aged Beef
What Is Dry-Aged Beef?
Why Is Dry-Aged Beef More Expensive?
Can I Dry-Age Beef at Home?
Listen to my podcast with Pat for a primer on all things meat:

Content: You can find steaks that have been dry-aged from 7 to even up to 120 days. The most common timeframe for a steak to be dry-aged is 30 days. The meat doesn’t spoil during this time, because you age it in conditions that tightly control the levels of moisture and bacteria. During the dry-aging process, moisture is drawn out of the meat. This causes the beef flavor to become even beefier and more flavorful. What’s more, the aging process causes the beef’s natural enzymes to break down the connective tissue in the meat, making it more tender. A crust of fungus which grows on the outside of the meat while it ages furthers this tenderization process, while adding a nice, corn-like flavor to your beef (you scrape this fungal crust off before cooking). Dry-aging is basically a controlled decomposition of the meat, which sounds kind of gross, but results in a meat that is 1) more flavorful and 2) more tender. The longer a piece of beef has been dry-aged, the more flavorful and tender it will be. In his book Meat, celebrity butcher and former podcast guest Pat LaFrieda gives a nice explanation of how the flavor and tenderness of a steak changes depending on how long it’s been dry-aged, which I’ve condensed and summarized below: