Flavor Perfection Is Challenging the Very First Fermentation Benefit

Do you know how fermentation works? If not, you aren’t alone. Lately, an increasing number of people does know though, and precisely at that. 30% of the food eaten worldwide is fermented, so chances are that you eat fermented food on a regular. As fermentation is taking the world by storm, this number may go up soon. After all, fermented foods do come with a long list of benefits. It’s not only that they are made to last without going bad. They also produce a myriad of interesting flavors. But do these benefits come as a 'bouquet' where each 'flower' compliments the other, or do sometimes come out thorns with one of them trying to outshine the others?

Fermentation & Its Bunch of Benefits

Indulging in fermented foods like sauerkraut, yoghurt, pickles and chocolate is said to be extremely healthy for you, in particular for your guts. Good bacteria from fermented foods do some groundwork for maintaining your body health. That is also where you know the label ‘probiotic’ from, which stands for food with live bacteria and yeasts promoting your digestive system.

The wisdom of food preservation through fermentation has been cherished for millenia. It’s a natural phenomenon that makes things last and ensures that nothing goes to waste. It also helped our ancestors last. They were able to store foods in man-made holes and dig them out once needed, leading to their survival.

How rewarding making your own food and knowing what you eat can be, is experienced best as a curious DIYer. When you start fermenting your own food, you may come to enjoy it following the adage “good things take time”. Good? Fancy some explosively stinky sardines, disgustingly sticky natto soybeans or blue cheese? As beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, the sensation of taste is with your tongue’s taste receptor buds and palate. As fermentation produces the most original flavors without any limit to their range, many of us have already fallen for fermento classics like a refreshing beer in summer or mouthwatering gherkins on a tasty burger. Some of us have already moved on to a rather exquisite fermented food: dry-aged beef.

Dry-Aged Beef Is Unlike Any Other

Dry-aged beef eaters belong to the folks who intimately know how fermentation works. ‘Dry-aging’ is the maturing of meat. Drying takes out the water of the meat, while microbes ferment their way towards tenderness and flavor in time. So dry-aged beef is not fermented food in the classical sense, but fermentation is what ultimately makes it the sought-after menu item it is today. So what makes gourmands and barbecuers alike so relentlessly addicted to dry-aged beef?

Back then, it used to be as unattractive as a piece of hanging carcass could be, which was extremely time-consuming to end up on an expensive restaurant menu. With its production process being an inefficient endeavor and its name perceived as awkward, the traditional craft behind it just had to drown hopelessly in an image problem. Michael Buhagiar, chef partner of San Francisco steak house ‘Harris’ Restaurant’ recalls perfectly, how people thought 30 years ago:

“When we opened, we had people say, ‘You’ll never make it by dry-aging.’”

01 Not So Cool

When Rembrandt colorfully captured hanging meat in the 17th century, he was one of only few who paid tribute to an art through art: the maturing of meat honored by a painter. Back then maturing was the common method for preserving meat. No wonder it didn’t strike us as anything outstanding.

“The process, by which butchers age beef carcasses in a low temperature, high humidity room for weeks, was hopelessly out of vogue in 1984.”

But as economy tells us: when something becomes rare, its value increases. And the food industry’s revolution made dry-aged beef a jaw-dropping want, that can’t just be had from your jar-swapping DIY friends.

02 It’s Complicated

The science behind dry-aged beef is complex, from soup to nuts. Starting off, you’ll need to locate the best meat you can get, be it from Ireland, Canada, Italy or elsewhere. But getting it is one thing, keeping it another. When putting meat on a cool room’s wood, hook or a metal rack, you’ll have to tiptoe the thin line of food safety between heaven (fermented-flavorful) and hell (rotten-disgusting). As beef can be contaminated with dangerous bacteria during the maturing process, temperatures need to be kept stable.

“Any colder than 33 degrees and the biochemical process stops working; any warmer than 38 degrees and it will likely spoil.”

Meat ages and dries best when humidity is between 60 and 80 percent, with constantly circulating air. Going to extremes is an option, if you ask David Burke’s Chicago Primehouse. Aiming for perfection in Chicago means adding some layers of complexity: Here, the dry-aging room even gets reinvented: extras like the use of UV light, 800-year old Himalayan salt tiling for air purification plus special seasoning bizarrely sound like a luxury hotel for beef.

Maturing beef takes precision on any level and a great deal of time. We are talking about typically 28-56 days, or atypically up to 15 years. What you want is naturally occurring (good) bacteria in the meat to flourish exactly how you want them to, and keep external (bad) bacteria from growing. The good ones break down the muscle fibers connecting collagen and as a result, the beef’s water will evaporate. By shrinking up to 30 percent as a result, the meat becomes more tender, while flavor and color intensify. When the bark develops a dark Rembrandt-like reddish brown on the outside, it gets shrinked once again: this time it’s the butcher’s knife which does the trimming, just before the meat is cut into steaks.

“Through the aging process, the beef develops a tangy, earthy scent—somewhat like buttered popcorn—a different sheen and a smooth texture. Flavors become more concentrated, beefier.”

So no wonder that dry-aged beef doesn’t come cheap: When you bite into a sizzling $36.34 up to $79 dry-aged 8-to-18 ounces steak, guess what your mouthful is worth! After all, up to 40% of the original cow gets lost on the journey. But three decades on, the San Francisco steak house Harris’ Restaurant is still dry-aging. Having defied its critics with its success story, it’s as if gastronomers and Michelin-star chefs today wanted to outright add something in their own right to prove the critics wrong: The race for the oldest, the most delicious and the most tender dry-aged beef is in full swing. How come?

Mass Production & Marketing Came Along

01 The Good Type of Special

Things have changed - completely. The price has found its audience: expensive now equals exclusive. It’s a well-off and educated audience from Tokyo to Dubai that finds itself attracted to the dry-aged beef crave.

“In today’s food world, guests are more educated than ever,” - David Laxer (president and proprietor of Florida Bern’s Steak House)

Thanks to innovators such as the Scandinavian restaurant Noma, fermented foods put on a new dress, and thus became presentable to the luxury gastro-segment. Dry-aged beef has long been a secret deal maker on Wall Street - and who knows - maybe a stealthy relationship savior as an ‘accompaniment’. This is the crowd which is responsible for its slowly maturing rise from the bottom to the top of menus. They were the ones who first considered dry-aged beef a genuine masterpiece of curing, and happily making room in their capacious wallets.

“You have to take into account that many guests in steak houses are on business accounts and are entertaining clients. So they have a larger discretionary budget.” - Cliff Bramble (co-owner of Kevin Rathbun Steak)

But dry-aged beef also pleases another fanbase of flavor addicts: the parallel universe of the mainstream. We see more hobby cooks and grill lovers not only upgrade to smart grills, but increasingly reach for dry-aged labels in supermarkets - even though those may be fake sometimes, as seen in Japan. After all, streaming chef expertise on Netflix now is just the touch of a button away. Despite of surging beef prices, the exploding Salami trend may have become a silent, but powerful ally to dry-aged beef: all food safety concerns are gone, and with it the inhibitions for holding back funds. The mainstream budgets echo the more brimming ones: only the best products are good enough, no matter what it takes.

“And once people eat dry-aged beef, it ruins anything else for them.”- Larry McGuire (managing partner of McGuire Moorman Hospitality)

Popularity doesn’t automatically translate into profit, though. As per Jon Weber from the San Diego Cowboy Star Restaurant and Butcher Shop, dry-aged beef typically performs about 8 percent less in terms of profit margin compared to the restaurant’s other beef programs. So the attention grabber called for either product or perception improvement.

“We lose a minimum of 40 percent (though the standard is less) to start; the longer we age, the more we lose,” Gresh says. “We price accordingly to keep our food costs in line around 32 percent overall.”

More sophisticated selling techniques became the answer to people who bark, but still will buy. The previously image-battered dry-aged got upgraded to a ‘taste revolution’. The art of the upsell grabbed the hand of ‘The Art of Fermentation’, and worked its flirting technique with the mainstream: Smart menu maneuvering, so that selling side dishes makes dry-aged beef worth serving, and waiters suggesting lower food cost sides such as potatoes, sauces, onion rings, spinach etc. as steak ‘accompaniments’, priced between $3 and $7.50 per item.

“Oh, dry-aging is definitely gaining in strength,” Buhagiar says. “It just sounds better as a selling point.” - Kevin Rathbun Steak

Accompaniments don’t flatter the luxury segment, here the concept is the magic ingredient. Bonein or boneless, it has to look dramatic on the plate. And a lot of drama has to go into it as well. While aiming for the dry-aged beef to be untouched and let it speak for itself, lately some considerable thought goes into sides and seasoning. Quality overrides quantity: Most of the top US steak houses add as little as some salt and pepper, and no more than a scent of garlic, butter or olive oil. But some do go the extra mile. At Kevin Rathbun Steak in Atlanta, where salt is used for dry-aged beef seasoning, the salt comes with its own homemade flavor: daily-blended kosher salt with fresh parsley, sage, thyme, garlic and pepper, and oven-dried on top of that. And here it is where the hunger for perfection has elevated the dry-aged beef to an artisan sensation - back to its roots, the craft, but taken to the next level.

Another major factor that has propelled the revival of a lost art must be the ongoing trend of fermenting foods. Its icon, Sandor Katz, author of ‘The Art of Fermentation’ is basically all over the news: Youtube, The Economist, The New York Times and his own forum (www.wildfermentation.com). His followers call fermentation a lifestyle in search of independence from the food industry protocol. The timing seems just right: In times of Jeff Potter’s ‘Cooking for Geeks’ and Simon Sinek’s ’Find your Why’, people crave for the story looming behind. Looking at ‘Supersize Me’ and all the food that represents the idea of unhealthy food, the dry-aged beef had to become a sophisticated art worth all the time and delicate care, while it is becoming an ever starker contrast to the conventional (or former) perception of beef. Dry-aged beef has decided to make flavor perfection its ultimate purpose, and with that it answered to the Why. Would Rembrandt, too, buy? The power of perception won.

“Dryaging was sort of a lost art,” says Rick Gresh, former executive chef at David Burke’s Primehouse in Chicago. “But as people have explored pickling, canning and going back to the way things were done years ago, they’ve rediscovered dry aged meats.”

02 Fastforwarding the Production Game

Up until the 1970’s, meat had been dry-aged. Vacuum packaging technology sent the food industry on a new course: the era of wet-aged beef. Happy meatpackers witnessed meat aging faster while retaining more water weight translating into more profit. Thanks to the advancement of technical engineered cooling systems, food safety risks were minimized. So the traditional meat hanging method made space for the food industry revolution: In the world of ‘more, faster, better’ there was no place for the good old dry-aged beef. But vintage being vintage, it always is good for a comeback: dry-aged beef is having its moment.

On the Same Team, But Competing

What goes unnoticed in the wave of attention is, that the original concept of fermentation was about preserving, about making things last, stretching resources and letting nothing go to waste. Only later on, the huge plus of flavor perfection was added. The backbone of fermentation benefits now is wrestling with a newcomer: Up to 40% of that original beef is lost in the process, while piece by piece is cut off for the sake of perfection. Our dry-aged beef whispers it secretly on its own, dramatic as it’s presented on the plate, being crowned as “the sweetest and juiciest” beef in the world and praised with features like ‘substantial fat cap’ and ‘superior marbling’:

“Two old friends set up against each other like two boxers in the ring: nothing-goes-to-waste versus flavor perfection.“

The further fanatics push the boundaries, the more they extend the aging time for the ultimate flavor experience, the more cow gets lost on the way - and the thinner gets the line: are we still fermenting, or already rotting? Is the hunger for perfection still healthy, or have our desires become rotten? Contradictory often promises to be interesting. Dry-aged beef is no different. It lends itself perfectly as a temptation: both to a meat lover’s dinner and drama. Maturing will show, if we survive the intense aging process without drying out. Will the contradiction result in wine, that gets better the older it turns, or will its contradiction outdate itself?

What do you think? Leave me a comment below!

FERMENTATION - Dry-Aged Beef Creates a Fermentation Contradiction