Is Ground Beef Better Is It Is Aged
Fabulous steaks are everywhere, but a truly excellent burger is exceedingly rare. There's a reason for this. The finest steaks are dry-aged to give them that elusive scent of truffles and earth, that deep, make clean mineral tang. Sadly, dry crumbling is an arcane art that is slowly being lost.
In the hands of butchers who know what they're doing, something most magical happens when great hunks of beef are left to hang in cold air. Equally the moisture slowly evaporates, the meat shrinks and its texture changes, becoming soft, silky, and tender. More important, the flavors concentrate, growing richer, rounder, and more powerful with each passing day. This is the elusive umami flavor; this is the taste of time. And no one has always figured out a fashion to faux it.
But aging whatever product—vino, cheese, cigars—is a costly and profligate process, and in the terminate you lot have something that is both more (succulent) and less (heavy). (Beef loses up to 15 per centum of its weight as information technology ages, and it becomes crusty, then the outside must be cut off. The result is meat that is about 40 pct lighter than it was when it went into the aging room.)
Because dry aging is such a time-consuming and expensive affair, fewer and fewer butchers bother; most settle for moisture aging in vacuum-sealed plastic, an entirely different process that sets off only a minor range of the changes that occur with dry aging.
The very fact that well-aged beef is increasingly difficult to find has created a new rage for aging. Young butchers are relearning this ancient art, and they are pushing the limits. Traditionally, beefiness was aged for three to four weeks, but the new breed of chefs and butchers are experimenting, aging their meat for longer stretches of time. The pinnacle of this might be New York'south blazing hot Cote restaurant, where you tin (for a price) sense of taste meat that has been aged for equally long equally four and a half months. It is fantastic stuff.
If dry crumbling makes a good steak spectacular, information technology does even more for a burger. It is the divergence between ground beef on a bun and a royal meal. Just, predictably, while few butchers continue to dry-age steak, even fewer grind dry-aged beef into burgers. Which is why I have spent years buying dry out-aged sirloin and chopping information technology by hand.
And then I discovered DeBragga. The family-owned business, which calls itself "New York's Butcher," has been effectually for most a century. Long one of the largest surviving butchers in the Meatpacking District, DeBragga bowed to gentrification in 2011 and decamped to New Jersey. Merely little else inverse. It is still doing things the old-fashioned mode, slowly crumbling its finest beefiness. Its main business is supplying restaurants; all the big guys buy from the company.
This content is imported from Instagram. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more than information, at their web site.
This is, for domicile cooks, a very good thing, because DeBragga grinds the trimmings from wholesale steaks and roasts into burger meat, adding a judicious amount of dry-aged brisket. The first fourth dimension I opened a package of DeBragga'south dry-aged hamburger meat, the smell near made me swoon. I knew, in that instant, that I had found burger nirvana.
I like the taste of char as much as anyone, but I consider this meat too skillful to grill; I don't want annihilation to come betwixt me and the clean, almost nutty flavor. I as well eschew lettuce, tomatoes, and cheese, but that, of course, is up to you. I exercise insist that y'all cook this meat very carefully. Form your burgers with wet easily, about an inch and a half thick, and be very gentle in your bear on. Shower them with good sea salt.
Become a cast fe or other sturdy skillet very hot—smoking hot—and cook the burger for about a minute to get a really good sear. Flip information technology carefully—you don't want to release the juices—and sear the other side. And then lower the oestrus and melt your burgers until they're just the style you similar them. (Personally I similar my meat rare, then I apply a thermometer and cook my burgers to 125 degrees.)
Now comes the important role: Permit your burgers to rest for at to the lowest degree five minutes before you take a bite. They appreciate having a niggling time to breathe. You lot'll capeesh it too.
This story appears in the June/July 2018 issue of Town & Country. Subscribe Today
This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. Yous may exist able to detect more information almost this and like content at pianoforte.io
Source: https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/dining/a20875796/best-hamburger-dry-aged-beef/
0 Response to "Is Ground Beef Better Is It Is Aged"
Post a Comment