Re:Risks of Home Dry Aging

[Steven]

Thanks for your reply.

quote :

Are you referring to open air aging? UMAi DrybagSteak dry aging?…

Ideally all of the above as it would be great to better understand all the differences among all those different conditions, but I know that little if any testing has been done, so I’d be happy with whatever is known about any home-aging setup vs. a “commercial” dry age.

quote :

If you were to look into the process of commercial dry aging, your assumption of safety would certainly be shaken.

I get your point that you’ve observed real-world commercial dry aging to be scarily haphazard. I’ll rephrase my question to ask about home dry aging vs gold-standard dry aging, i.e. carefully, correctly, and professionally done dry aging with all the right equipment and controls.

quote :

I would be very interested to understand where you gain your information for the impression that “Best I can tell several factors make home refrigerator dry aging more problematic than commercial dry aging.”

Observation and common sense to me that a home fridge is not a well-controlled environment. For example, I’ve measured the temp swings in my home fridge using a scientific thermometer. It takes ~3 minutes to recover back to <38F on the bottom shelf of my normally loaded (decent thermal mass) residential fridge. Assuming ~6 opens per day that's ~20 minutes a day that dry aging meat is exposed to temps >38F. Typical fresh food and meats spoil or are thrown out after a week but meat undergoing a 21 day dry age would encounter ~400 minutes at temps >38F. I’m curious if that presents any additional risks versus a carefully controlled aging environment with uninterrupted <38F temps.

Similar situation with humidity/surface moisture as in the winter where I live it's dry as a bone but in the summer there is high ambient humidity that produces a light fog of condensation on my internal fridge surfaces when I open the door.

quote :

all but the rare specialized commercial dry aging operation experiences exactly the same swings and potential contamination challenges, not to mention flavor-impacting environmental influences.

The implication here is that these swings are not causing any detected health problems in the marketplace. Which is somewhat reassuring and good to know. But less reassuring than a study of what the safe parameters for dry aging actually are. I realize that probably hasn’t been done by the FDA or anyone else, unfortunately!

quote :

best answered by what the scientists who have studied our material have told us again and again–trust your nose. Bad meat is readily recognized by the human nose..

Sorry, but this is misleading and dangerous. Pathenogenic organisms and their associated toxins are odorless and tasteless. It is true that a foul odor is a good sign the conditions have gone far enough outside safe parameters that all kinds of unwanted organisms are growing, but the reverse is not true, that a lack of foul odor indicates no pathogenic organisms are growing

I have read the two papers linked on the site and I appreciate the information they do provide but they are clearly focused on comparing bagged dry aging vs. open air dry aging in terms of moisture loss and taste difference. They don’t address what the safe environmental parameters of dry aging are. I’m very eager to read any studies that do, given that commonly practiced dry aging parameters are outside typical food safety norms along several dimensions, in my mind raising the risk of problems if just one other dimension goes awry.