What went wrong? Striploin FAR 2 hard, tough & dry

[Scott Nolan]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the reply and information.

The meat was a fairly high quality and was from a very highly regarded butcher here in Sydney. Obviously, that is no guarantee, but they have always been excellent in the past. There was a really good degree of quality marbling too.

As to the fridge: I actually bought a brand new, top-of-the-line Mitsubishi fridge just prior to this. I had old bar fridges that weren’t going to suffice. The fridge has constantly circulating airflow and is very good. BUT… when you mentioned “gone haywire”, specifically, what conditions would constitute “haywire” in this instance? If the fridge was too cold, could that do it? I had measured the internal temp with a very high quality probe and it was sitting at around 0.5c – 1C (32.9F – 33.8F). Could this be too cold? Or, did you more mean the temperature was not constant enough? Our 15y/o CONSTANTLY opens the fridge to stand there and just stare at the contents for several minutes at a time (as a lot of kids do) – MANY times a day :-/

So, I guess I’m asking, what are the cooling conditions that would contribute to it drying out too much? And to clarify, it’s not like it’s gone jerky style – more just rubbery with very little give…

Thanks again for all the help with this. I really want to get this working properly and hope I can ascertain the cause so I can eliminate next time.

Cheers,
Scott.