BY W. WAYT GIBBS
Associated Press
You don’t have to go to some high-end steakhouse or shell out $200 a pound for ultramarbled Wagyu beef from Japan to get flavorful, tender beef for your next barbecue. Just keep three crucial factors in mind: the grade, the grain and the aging. A well-informed purchase and a couple of easy prep steps can make the difference between a so-so steak and one that sends your eyeballs skyward.
Step No. 1: buy the best meat that fits your budget. To do that, you need to know a bit about how beef is graded in the U.S. The system is based mostly on the age of the animal and the amount of marbling in the meat.
“USDA prime” is the highest grade. Only about 3 percent of cattle meet the criteria, so most prime-grade meat is snatched up by fancy restaurants and specialty butchers before it makes it to supermarkets. Below that is “choice,” followed by “select.” Anything below these is best avoided for steaks, ribs and roasts. In Canada, the equivalent grades are called “Canada prime,” “AAA,” and “AA.”
Though the visible fat content of red meat is easy to measure, researchers have found that it accounts for only about 5 percent of the variation in meat tenderness. The Australian government uses a much more reliable grading system that takes into account other important factors, including what the animal ate, how it was treated, and the pH of its muscles, which reflects how humanely it was slaughtered.
If cattle are exhausted, shivering, injured or highly stressed at the time they are killed, their muscles deplete their natural fuel store of glycogen, and the pH of the meat is abnormal as a result. Beef that is unusually dark, firm and dry often is a product of poor slaughterhouse practices.
A grade stamped on the package is one useful piece of information about the quality of the meat, but it isn’t the end of the story. Some of the best beef is not graded at all; it is sold by small producers who can’t afford to pay the high costs of having a USDA grader on site. In other cases, official-sounding labels — such as Certified Angus Beef — are not grades, but rather brand names used by loose associations of ranchers to make their meat appear distinctive.
Step No. 2: Whether you spring for a prime tenderloin or a select flat-iron steak, you can get the most tenderness out of the cut if you pay attention to the grain. Just like wood, meat is a collection of long, skinny fibers. If you cut the meat along the fibers, it’s like sawing boards out of a tree trunk: the resulting pieces are very strong and hard to chew. Instead, slice across the fibers; the tougher the cut, the thinner the slices should be. Each bite will then fall apart more easily and release more of its juices and flavor.
Step No. 3: For a real steakhouse experience, try aging your meat before you cook it. The best steakhouses use special humidity-controlled rooms to dry-age beef for a month or more. The drying process concentrates sugars, protein fragments, and other flavorful molecules to yield unparalleled taste. But because the steaks shrink as they dry and much of the exterior has to be trimmed off before cooking, this is typically an expensive step.
Here’s a shortcut: brush Asian fish sauce onto the steak (use about 3 grams of sauce for every 100 grams of meat). Put the coated steak in a zip-closure bag, then remove the air by submerging the bag in water while holding the open end just above the surface (the water forces the air out of the bag). Seal the bag, then lift it out of the water. Refrigerate the sealed meat for three days before you cook it. You may be surprised by how much tenderer the steak becomes and by the depth of its meaty, umami flavor.
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Photo credit: Nathan Myhrvold / Modernist Cuisine, LLC
If we used the fish sauce, does it affect anything if I plan to cook the steak sous vide at 120 first?
You can certainly brush after cooking, but it won’t have as noticeable an affect as brushing before cooking.
Hi,
How about a fish sauce brand recommendation? thanks
As sverlyn aberfelty says below, Red Boat is a great brand.
The fish sauce sounds like a great way to boost the umami flavor. Have you tried adding the fish sauce to the steak in a vacuum bag and cooking it sous vide straight away without the 3 days of refrigerating?
red boat for fish sauce- the best
Is this any different than just salting the meat for the same amount of time? Is anything from the fish sauce besides the salt actually doing anything?
The fish sauce has glutamates that give the steak a deeper, more meaty taste than salt would alone.
I am curious if anyone has tried the Umai Drybag steak aging kit and their thoughts on it?
I have been looking into buying a small refrigerator, replacing the thermostat with a precision thermostat and humidity monitor and connecting this to a humidifier that I will place in side the fridge along with fan to keep the air circulating. Finally, I was considering replacing the light with a UV light to ensure there is no bacteria growth and then reversing the connection so that the light comes on when the door is shut.
I don’t know if MC has done research on this – but I have read that the humidity should be kept around 85%. This seems awfully high – I would have thought you would want to keep humidity low to encourage water loss, no?
IIRC, the purpose of high humidity is to prolong the drying time. If the surface dries out quickly, it creates a barrier to the moisture on the interior of the meat that can’t then pass to the outer layer and will simply stay on the inside, which then causes it to spoil if left for a while.
Do not use a UV light! You will kill the bacteria who are doing all the work of aging the beef. Without our little prokaryote buddies we would not have dry aged steaks, just dry steaks and that is not as tasty.
Some notes on bacteria: they are our friends, they coat every inch of our skin and form our first line of defense against viruses. They coat every inch of our digestive system from our mouths to our … well, you know, and we could not digest fabulous dry aged beef (or anything else) without them!
Please don’t kill my buddies!
[…] of meat or more accurately simulate a dry aged steak with robust beefiness. I read about it on The Modernist Cuisine site and as you can tell there’s not much info on the why. I wanted to include it in the […]