 so i got this fridge from a guy off a truck and now we're dry aging some steaks so let me show you guys my cute little setup here so we need circulation i have a fan blowing on a high speed to make the air circulate if the air doesn't circulate they're just going to be moisture on the meat that stays there what you're essentially doing is you're blowing the moisture around the refrigerator to keep the humidity even throughout you definitely need air circulation and a dehumidifier if you want to dry age meat the dehumidifier does have a built-in air filter this fills up this is one day so this fills up pretty quickly i might help to put another air filter in in this but let's take an actual look at these steaks here these are kind of just leaning up against and if you notice they're covered in white that's not actually mold although mold can be white that is beef fat and the reason i covered this in beef fat is so it's easier to cut so all i did was i took the primal i coated it in beef fat and then i put it on the racks in the fridge as you can see you know i have a bunch of racks here resting on towels i do need to run these through the washing machine and uh and get this cleaned up but there is a lot of variance here in the thickness of the ribeye you can see this one's a lot thicker and this one's a lot thinner so this one is 45 day dry age i believe these two are around 25 days so this one is definitely old enough to take out typically steaks are dry aged for a minimum of 28 days i've had steaks up to 90 days that were delicious but uh let's take this out and put it in i mean it's a pretty ghetto setup i just have the cords running out of the fridge and i can close the fridge just fine with the cords like that and then i just have the power strip down there okay so i just weighed this on the scale it's 8 pounds 13 ounces and when the meat dry ages depending on the time you dry age it for it does lose a percentage of its weight a minimum of 10 percent usually for 28 days problem with this is if we have a steak that's this thin we have to trim off all of the outside of the steak so we're going to be left with a very thin steak this is the reason that people typically don't dry age a lot of grass fed steaks because they're really thin a usda prime steak might be this thick if the steak is this thick as you can imagine the percentage of loss is much less unfortunately in this case i think we're going to see a fairly high percentage of loss in comparison to the final yield so i'm going to trim this up as best i can and we're going to weigh the amount of trim waste that we have so right now what i'm doing is i've kept the primal hole and i'm like trimming you know as little off as possible like this i'm just trimming the top off and you know it takes forever it really does take a while to do this and this is what meat purveyors do generally before they sell the primals to the restaurant but what i prefer doing is i cut the steak and then i cut the edges off the steak it's a lot easier so you cut one steak and then we can look at the edges and see how much we have to trim off so all we do after we cut the steak is we just go down the edges and it's a lot easier than actually just trimming it off this is much less time consuming and it's a lot easier the only downside is you can't keep the primal intact when you do this show you guys one more and then i'll finish it up myself so the beef fat definitely makes it easier to cut the surface is not as hard and dried out although it's still a little difficult to cut through so again just trim the dry aged edges off there's our steak this has an unusual amount of fat and marbling for a grass-fed steak and now we have about three pounds of waste which is pretty pretty substantial so about six pounds of meat yielded from nine pounds of dry age so we did lose you know we lost 10% from the dry aging and then we lost 30% from the trimming so very substantial loss for a thinner steak normally it would only be about 10 to 15% from the weight lost from the dry aging and then maybe 10 to 15% from trimming but we're still looking at a pretty substantial loss of meat when you dry age something you know one of the one of the first thing you guys might notice is how much darker the meat is that's because of the weight loss of the meat while dry aging what happens is the meat loses moisture the beef becomes more concentrated in flavor there's less water and corresponds to the amount of cells there are so the color becomes a lot darker if you smell this meat it has like a deep nutty funky smell almost like cheese and i'm not going to cook these because there's no point of me tasting this in front of you guys the only thing i can really do is to describe the taste for you and what the dry aging process does dry aging process does several things to the meat it makes the meat much more tender substantially more tender not only does it make the meat more tender it has a more desirable texture it's softer the meat itself when you cut it and bite into it it's more tender and the actual structure of the protein is different the fat develops this deep nutty almost cheese like flavor depending on how long it's aged and that combined with the loss of moisture in the meat makes a very very flavorful steak and to me or anyone i think who's tried steak i don't think there's anyone who would ever prefer a non-age steak over a 28 or a 45 day dry age steak it just improves the flavor it concentrates the flavor it makes the steak more tender there's no con to dry aging in regards to the flavor of the meat the main downside is the weight you lose so hypothetically if you bought a 15 pound prime ribeye primal you would expect to lose about two pounds from the dry aging so maybe you're done to 13 pounds and then if you trim it really well and really thoroughly you'll lose about a pound and a half so for 15 pounds of meat you'll end up with 11 and a half pounds of trimmed dry aged steaks i paid seven dollars a pound for 11 pounds of this meat and i ended up with six pounds so i paid roughly double because of how much i lost on the thinness of the steak so keep in mind guys if you do this the steak has to be thick and there's also no point in dry aging lean beef because although it might make it more tender all of the flavor benefits come from the fat so if you do dry age a lean steak you might not really notice that much of a difference in the flavor at all maybe a slight difference in tenderness that's why people don't dry age filet mignon temperature on my refrigerator is actually pretty cold it's like 36 37 degrees you can dry age at a much warmer temperature than that if you wanted to probably in the low 40s pretty easily the humidity i just make sure to run the dehumidifier some days i turn it on some days turn it off that will vary depending on the humidity of your garage wherever you're storing this refrigerator you can expect to do this for a minimum of 28 days i really prefer the flavors that develop around 45 days and even further than that and honestly if i didn't have a histamine issue and histamine issues come from aged meat so if i could eat as much aged meat as i wanted this is all i would eat unfortunately i can't really do that because i do have a histamine intolerance thank you guys for watching if you guys are really looking forward to doing this listen go to a nice steakhouse take your girlfriend out to dinner or boyfriend out to dinner buy them a nice 45 day dry aged steak get a nice dry aged steak see if you like it don't do this without knowing if you like it and there's also the risk of flies getting to it laying eggs in the primals and maggots so there's definitely some concern about warmer weather even though it's a refrigerator and the flies will die if they get in the fridge there is definitely a concern about just buying a large amount of meat several hundred pounds worth of meat for some people you know you generally want to age maybe like 60 70 pounds at once if you want to have it rotating in and out so you constantly have some dry aged meat to consume and having the meat on the rack like this you can literally dry age it indefinitely you could i've seen people dry age steaks for 180 days 300 days the meat will last until you consume it pretty much on a rack with the dehumidifier with the fan blowing a nice air circulation if you want to store meat in a different way i would use butcher paper or cryo vac to try to keep it somewhat fresh and it will stay okay in the fridge for maybe once to three weeks depending on how old it was when you got it from the butcher outside of that plastic wrap plastic bags i'm not really a fan thank you guys for watching if you guys would like to support me please subscribe and share the video i am doing exclusive videos for my patreon now so be sure to check that out if you guys are on social media check out my twitter my instagram i do have an amazon shop where i have all my salts and all the products i use on a daily basis and in addition to that if you guys want to reach out to me for one-on-one consultations you can send me an email it's in the description or you can reach out to me through the contact form on my website