We have traditions. For Fourth of July we have a cook out, Thanksgiving is a traditional turkey dinner with all the trimmings and Christmas we have a standing rib roast with dauphinoise potatoes
, fresh yeast rolls and a few rotating vegetables. This Christmas was no different, but earlier in the year I had read about a technique for taking wet-aged beef from the supermarket and imparting the flavors of a dry aged cut of meat and I wanted to try it out.
I believe this process was originally described in one of the Modernist Cuisine books (at home?) but I first read about it on the Seriouseats blog. The process takes some time, so 8 days before Christmas I went to our local supermarket (Jewel-Osco) and picked up a 2 bone rib roast. After looking at what was available I picked one that was a good mix of lean muscle to fat, I would describe it as solidly in the choice grade. Once at home I started the process.
The first step in the faux-aging process is to coat the cut of beef with fish sauce, vacuum seal and let it sit in the refrigerator for 3-4 days. I grabbed a bottle of Tiparo's Fish Sauce from the pantry and tried to coat every surface of the roast, then let it sit in the run-off for a few minuted while I cut and prepared a suitably large Foodsaver bag. The roast was just small enough to fit in the bag, which was then vacuum sealed and left in the refrigerator for four days.
The next step is to remove the roast from the bag and let it sit in the refrigerator loosely covered for a few days to allow moisture to evaporate from the meat. The way I saw it described (which was for steaks instead of roasts) was to wrap the meat in a few layers of cheesecloth, but since I didn't have any of that laying around I just draped a couple of sheets of parchment paper of the roast and covered the whole thing with a dish towel. Before covering I had coated the exposed meat with cracked black pepper. This was left in the refrigerator for 3 more days.
This was the roast after three days dehydrating in the refrigerator, as you can see the fat cap had turned a bit yellowish/brown and there were some dark areas on the exposed muscle. The next step was to trim the roast of most of the fat cap and any discolored meat. Before starting, I set my new Anova Precision Cooker up on a 12 quart Cambro, filled it to a few inched above the minimum and started heating the bath to 132f.
I then went about trimming the roast, all the scraps were saved so I could render them down later and use the fat for other parts of the meal. Once trimmed the roast was seasoned with salt and pepper, and I broke out the Searzall to sear all the surfaces. There are several schools of thoughts when it comes to searing sous vide cooked meats. I like to sear before AND after the soak. The initial sear not only serves to kill off any surface bacteria that might be present, but the Maillard reactions that occur during the sear will have a chance to permeate the meat during the soak. The second searing lets you develop a good crust on the meat. The seared roast was again vacuum sealed using the Foodsaver and the bag placed in the water bath. I added water to bring the bath up to near the max level and left it to soak for about 5 hours.
Here is the bagged roast soaking in the water bath. Initially the temperature went down about 10 degrees when the roast was added and the water level topped off, but the circulator rebounded quickly and the bath temperature was back up where I wanted it within 10 minutes.
After 5 hours it was time to remove the roast from the bath. This was the day before Christmas, so the roast was chilled in an ice bath and set in the refrigerator until the next day. For serving I simply rethermed the roast in a 130f bath for about an hour, then removed from the bag, patted dry and allowed to rest for about 10 minutes before placing in a very hot oven (500f) for about 10 minutes to dry off the outer surface and develop a nice crust.
To serve with the roast I made a quick mushroom/black garlic gravy. I've been playing around with black garlic a bit lately and wanted to find a way to incorporate it in the the meal. Shallots and mushrooms were browned in some of the fat rendered from the beef trimmings, once suitably colored a bit of flour was added to form a roux. The roux was cooked for a few minutes to get rid of the raw flour taste, minced black garlic was added and the pan was deglazed with some red wine. Beef broth was added and the gravy was left to reduce and thicken on the stove top.
So was it worth it? The resulting roast had some of the flavors you expect to find in dry-aged beef, but at a fraction of the cost. Real dry aged beef will have more concentrated and complex flavors, but if you don't want to pay 5 times as much this technique will give you a good result somewhere between a wet aged roast and its much more expensive dry aged cousin.
