The Gotta-Have-It-All Kitchen Gift Guide

Umai dry bags These folks contacted me early in the year to ask me if I was interested in trying their system for dry-aging steak in your fridge. Home dry aging is hard to do, because plastic-wrapped meat will funk up, and meat left exposed will absorb smells from your fridge and funk up everything else nearby it. I was pretty skeptical that their bags were going to work, but they ended up converting me.

Home dry aging is still not precisely easy -- you need a big hunk of meat (I like a prime bone-in rib roast), and it needs to have a hefty fat cap on it, because you’re going to end up trimming quite a bit off of the outside after the aging process is over, and you don’t want to be trimming away actual meat. Then you put it in the bags, which you are supposed to vacuum-seal, but I confess, I never got the hang of the vacuum sealing and ended up pushing the air out using the water displacement method, followed by sealing with a nice, tight rubber band. Finally, you leave it in the fridge for a month or so, cut off some steaks, slice off the green-looking bits from the edges, and grill what’s left.

Thinking this sounds like way too much work and complication? Before you make that decision, the steaks were awesome. I’m not saying that David Burke is going to serve my dry-aged Costco ribeyes at Primehouse, but I’d estimate we got about 90 percent of the way there, and they were better than what we’ve had at some very fancy local steakhouses. And we spent less for eight good steaks than we would have to take the two of us out for steaks and a bottle of wine.

ARTICLE FROM : https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2015-12-14/the-gotta-have-it-all-kitchen-gift-guide