Dry aged Blue cheese smell

[Mark Ennes]

I wanted to comment on this as there is precious few discussions on this and this one is the only one that is somewhat recent. Disclaimer – I don’t own a UAIi dry device and I don’t dry age my own beef, at least not yet. I do purchase dry aged beef maybe once every 4-5 weeks or so. I get them from our local Giant food store who in turn gets them from a farm in the area. The steaks always have great marbling and appear to be USDA Prime. In the past, I’ve always bought ribeye steaks and they’ve been wonderful. $19.99/lb. However this past time, I bought strip steaks. $19.99/lb. They were already sealed in shrink wrap and from the same farm and dry aged. Wonderful marbling. They had been packaged Feb 20 according to the label and the label said they should be sold by Feb 25. I bought two of these on Feb 23. They were on a refrigerated shelf which is designed to stay open. So I took them home, opened them ,and immediately got a strong whiff of something strange, something I had hadn’t smelled before from the half dozen times I bought aged beef. I tried to ignore it, but I finally had to let my wife get a whiff. She immediately recognized it as “aged cheese” and she was right. It smelled like aged cheese! It didn’t smell “bad” but it just wasn’t right and it wasn’t appealing. Still – I had to at least cook it up and taste it so I fired up the Weber, cooked it to perfection and served it. It tasted like aged cheese! It did not taste like beef! If I was a rookie I’d have assumed I just don’t like aged beef, but that is not the case. I love the taste of aged beef. It has a distinct taste. But this – I couldn’t eat it, it just wasn’t appealing. My wife didn’t finish hers either. I took them back the next day and they gave me my money back plus a coupon for a free steak. That’s nice but I still don’t understand what exactly happened. After thinking about it and reading this thread, I have to assume it was just over-aged to the point that it took on an aged cheese smell and taste which it would not have acquired if the aging was shorter. Any comments are appreciated. Thanks.