First Ribeye – Advice for next time?

[austin]

Twenty-one days ago I started with a Prime Ribeye Roast from Costco. Decided to cut it in half and slice off some fresh steaks because a) if the aging went totally sideways I could still use half the meat and b) I wanted steak.

The sealing process was pretty straightforward. I did the clean transfer method, then slid half the roast out of the drybag to cut it in half, then cut the bag to size and toweled off the opening. I ended up having to use two vac-mouse bags (the first one got saturated with juices and stopped allowing the foodsaver to pull air through it), but I stacked the second one on top and it worked fine. Aside from a couple of the bone cavities I had complete contact with the meat surface, easily better than 90%.

[austin]

I also wanted to log the temperature and humidity of the refrigerator during the aging process, so I hooked up a nifty little sensor from Bosch (BME280) to write the temperature and humidity to a MicroSD card once a minute. I had to fiddle with the temperature control a little bit, but it stayed mostly under 38F throughout the process. Due to some technical difficulties I missed logging the first couple days.

[austin]

I’m pretty happy with how things turned out, though the steaks were a bit smaller than I expected. Though I tried not to over-trim, the final products don’t have much spinalis meat on them. I had a small wedge-shaped steak left over from slicing, so I seared it for a couple minutes in a cast iron pan for a taste test. The texture was great, and the flavor was very good (I didn’t notice much flavor difference from fresh beef, but at 21 days I didn’t really expect to get any strong flavor changes). Going to grill a few of them properly tomorrow.

I bought one of the smaller ribeye roasts in the refrigerator at Costco, which in hindsight might have been a mistake. I’ve also seen that other sources suggest finding roasts that are more intact (I’m not sure what the numerical designation of the Costco roast is, but I’ve seen advice elsewhere to find a 107 or 109A to minimize how much usable meat gets removed). Any advice for next time?

[James]

I’m most interested in the sensor that you used to record temp and humidity. I see that the chip/board itself is available, but are there instructions on putting it together…maybe a kit or something?

[austin]

quote jamestbbq” post=7934:

I’m most interested in the sensor that you used to record temp and humidity. I see that the chip/board itself is available, but are there instructions on putting it together…maybe a kit or something?

Just hooking up the sensor itself is relatively straightforward.

I didn’t use this exact product, but it looks like there is a pretty good tutorial here.here

I did use a couple extra components to make it more useful, specifically a MicroSD card module and a realtime clock.

[Author]

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