The Original Dry Bag Steak | Make Artisan Dry Age Steak at Home › Forums › Dry Aging Steak › Dry Aging Steak with UMAi Dry® › Effect of sous vide on rind › Effect of sous vide on rind
Sorry for not posting an update sooner, but life can be quite the distraction at times. B)
So I hacked off an end piece consisting mostly of rind, with just enough inner meat to try a small taste. After a 3-hour sous vide bath I found that the rind had indeed softened up considerably and had become fairly pliable. However it was still far too tough and chewy to eat. The flavor actually was not bad at all, but it was impossible to chew and so had to be trimmed off. That said, I used the cut-into-steaks-before-trimming method, so I was able to be very conservative in my trimming and eliminate what needed to go by only shaving off the outer 1-2mm or so. In fact the vast majority of the trimming loss (which was ~33% of the post-aging weight) was due to the elimination of excessive outer fat rather than the rind. Here was the weight loss by phase:
- Original vac-packed weight: 17.5 lbs
- Weight after 42 days of aging: 12.5 lbs
- Weight after trimming: 8.0 lbs
Here are the steaks pre and post-trim, for comparison. As you can see there was an excess of internal fat as well, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. I may well try a Choice subprimal next time, rather than Prime: