What is best, wet aged or dry aged meat?

We have long since known the virtues of dry aged meat after it has been slaughtered. During the aging process, meat (usually beef) carcasses, primal  or sub primal cuts  are placed in refrigerated enviroments and the meat is left to tenderize by naturally occuring enzymes helping to break down the connective tissure ensuring a more palatable tender product.  Delve a little deeper into the process and you’ll discover that aging meat comes in two completely separate categories. What is best, wet aged or dry aged meat?

Would it surprise you to know that up to 99% of beef that is readied for retail sale is wet aged? Wet aging is a process where the beef cuts are vacuum sealed,  usually at time of slaughter  and processing, refrigerated and left to age for 7 to 10 days before being  available for sale. This is the most cost-effective method for meat processors as the aging is usually all done whilst the meat is in transit to its final retail destination. There is no need for storing and the conditions that the beef require in order to age are considerably fewer than those required for dry aging.  These are all huge bonuses for the processor but result in a peice of beef that is not as well aged and lacking that delicious burst of flavor as it that comes with dry aging.

On the other hand, dry aging is a  traditional method of aging and results in a far superior product with optimum tenderness and flavor concentration. The dry aged process involves the meat being hung in a controlled environment for 21 to 28 days. Three main  factors are taken into account when beef is dry aged - temperature, humidity and air velocity. All these conditions must be closely observed and aligned in order to achieve a premium dry aged product with many purveyors of this food/art form being dedicated to providing their consumer base with the best on offer.

Why Dry Aged Meat Is Better

I asked Anthony Puharich, CEO of Vics Meats, which is the largest meat wholesaler in Australia,  if  there was any comparison between wet and dry aged meat?  His answer was “In terms of a flavor profile within the meat, there is no comparison between a steak that has been wet aged and one that has been dry aged”.  Dry aged steak has a flavor spike due to the slow evaporation of the water within the meat as it hangs in this carefully controlled environment. The meat is allowed time to tenderize through the natural occuring enzymes and intensify in flavor thanks to the evaporating water.

Vics meats commitment to provide their customers with a superior product sees them as one of the  only butcheries in Australia that commercially dry ages beef with Anthony’s father Vic Puharich being a pioneer in dry aging on a commercial scale.  Anthony tells me that none of their beef is wet aged with Vic meats being dedicated to this age old process that guarantees high quality and customer satisfaction.

One look into Vics Meats retail shop in Woollaraha ~ Victor Churchill is all that you need to understand how far Anthony and his Dad, Vic, are prepared to go to ensure only the best product will do. Victor Churchill’s drying room is a testament to the aging process. Encased behind a floor to ceiling glass wall, primal cuts of aging beef merrily-go-round on a custom built rotary metal chain rack before your eyes.  Russell Crowe’s own organic beef is amongst this parade of attractive fibres,  looking all dark, glorious  and crusty, a good sign of a well aged cut.

The back wall of the drying room is a feature not found in any other drying room around the world. Anthony has built the back wall out of bricks of Himalayan Pink salt, the purest form of salt known in the world.

Himalayan pink salt is hand harvested from the foothills of the Himalayan mountains from ancient sea beds believed to go back to the Jurassic period.  This salt contains the highest concentrations of minerals and has medicinal as well as culinary uses. Anthony’s pink salt wall is used to help keep the air in the drying room pure and  to enhance the flavor and preservation qualities of the dry aged meat as it hangs. Due to the air flow within the room, the only down fall Anthony says of having such a unique feature is that it naturally deteriorates and needs to be replaced every 18 months.

Anthony’s butchers at Victor Churchill cut beef to order, removing it from the drying room when needed and trimming and slicing as required. As this aging process involves more time, space and has a higher wastage than that of wet aged it can also incur a higher cost. But once you’ve experienced the difference, the flavor and quality of the beef will speak for itself.

Click here to visit the Victor Churchill website http://www.victorchurchill.com/ and if you’re  fortunate enough to be in Sydney drop by  their butchery to say HI! …and see their dry aged goodies!

Victor Churchill’s Butcher Shop and a Beautifully                       Glazed Christmas Ham.

Chapter 1:

Photo credits: Victor Churchill and The Internet Chef

Nothing could have prepared me for what we were about to experience once we pulled the sausage link door handles and stepped inside Victor Churchill’s Butcher shop in Sydney’s Eastern suburb of Woollahra. First thing you notice is Holy COW!!!, pardon the pun… this shop is stunning, visually arousing even.

It’s easily one of the most beautifully designed stores I have ever set foot in. In fact IT IS the most beautifully designed store in the whole world having just won the International Interior design award for retail stores which was held in New York a few weeks ago. The Victor Churchill butcher shop carved up the competition from the likes of Hermes and Louis Vuitton stores. This store has added value to spare and is proof in the black pudding that the retail  environment can fend off the advances of online shopping.

When surrounded by such finery, it’s hard to believe that your standing in the middle of a bustling butcher shop floor as there is none of the “normal indications”  that this is place where amazing meat comes to be worshipped by its adoring public. But this shop has more than rare retail carnivorous beauty to awe and amaze, it has a fifth element that was so unexpected and inspiring that it literally took my breath away.

The Butcher Shop with more

This shop has soul. And that soul is created and nurtured by the wonderfully warm and inviting Puharich family.

There is  energy within these walls, a rich history and a voice. For a start, this building is the oldest continuously run butcher shop in Australia. It opened in 1876 and still sells the locals of Woollahra its dietary staples.   None of the incredible design pieces that make up this theme park for butchers have been placed in haphazardly, they all have incredible meaning, wicked functionality and a delightful story that Anthony Puharich, the CEO and co-founder of Vics Meats along with his Father and best friend Victor,  is only too happy to share with you. It was a chance tweeting I had with Anthony aka @askthebutcher_  that led me to come into his butcher store and spend a few hours wandering through its incredible features.

Anthony greets me with the warmest smile and a huge hug, his generosity of spirit instantly evident. I can’t help but warm to him as we stand side by side in his Butcher’s boutique  taking in all the sights and sounds  that are happening around us. We begin the journey at the start, such a wise yet often missed placed starting point in any story. Anthony is roots. He has strong, solid family bonds that go back to the island of Croatia which his father Victor left some 40 years ago for the shores of Australia.

Anthony is a 5^th Generation butcher. His Dad’s a butcher, his Dad’s older brothers are butchers, his grandfather was a butcher and so was his Great grandfather. Anthony wears his love for his grandfathers on his sleeve by way of a tattoo on his forearm which reads ‘Buzaga’ which is a term of endearment given to someone who holds a lot of respect. Alongside  this tattoo are the names of his parents, his wife and his three children taking pride and place on the opposite arm.

You get the feeling that this is a man who believes whole heartily  in his family. He pays homage to his genealogy in everything he does and with such pride and diligence to stay true to what they have created within in him. Victor Churchill and Vics meats  is a family affair with father Vic, son Anthony and daughter Anita all working to create a wholesale meat empire, the largest in Australia where they process some 20 tonne of meat daily for the Sydney and Melbourne markets from their Mascot warehouse and now a retail extravagance that has managed to pick up that incredible world design award.

The success Anthony attributes to hard hard work. Their humble beginnings as an immigrant family where for 26 years Victor worked as a butcher to feed, support and nature his young family ensuring that they were well educated and well loved. Anthony went from high school to University where he gained a degree in Finance. With this degree in hand and a whisper of an idea in his pocket he convinced his Dad to open their first retail  butcher shop Vics Meat in 1996 in Oxford street  Darlinghurst.

The Victor Churchill and Vics Meats cherished timeline is a proud feature on the staff room wall

The next two years Anthony explains were tough. The demographic at the time that called that part of town home weren’t buying meat to take home and cook, being a community of people that loved to eat out. All their potential business was going through the front doors of restaurants, so Anthony decided to try knocking on the restaurants back doors. It was through this moment of brillance and a lucky break, which Anthony describes, came by way of Dietmayer Sawyer who was at the time executive chef of the wildly popular Level 41 restaurant that lead to the break that Vics meats needed  to get them into the market. Vics wholesale meats was born.

Over the next 12 years Anthony and Victor worked to create a wholesale empire with Victor Churchill retail being the jewel in the crown. Anthony’s labor of love can be felt throughout the store but none more so than in the genuinely  happy smiling faces of the staff that work at Victor Churchill’s. They take such pride in showing us different design features that they particularly enjoy and one of the delightful butchers put it so well when he said ” Its the closest you can get to working but not working”

So is this store all its cracked up to be? Well global talk-show queen Oprah seemed to think so, dropping in to visit on her way to the airport. She described it as a Butchers boutique and even managed to leave some grafitti on the wall alongside some other well respected food and televison personalities that have dropped by for a snag.

My 30 minute interview with Anthony turned into a 2 hour love fest with so much to see and and do, I couldnt possibly expect to write it all in one article, so here starts the Victor Churchill series. As I write this article, Christmas day is but 3 days away, so I have included a Victor Churchill Christmas Glazed Ham recipe which is cooked every day in store  by Executive chef Romeo Baudouin and sliced to order.

I’ve heard that Disneyland is the happiest place on earth… I beg to differ, Victor Churchill’s is.

Victor Churchill’s Christmas Glazed Ham

Recipe by Romeo Baudouin

Ingredients

200g brown sugar

20g dried mustard

60ml cidervinegar

60ml maple syrup

1 cup of cloves

1 Ham ~ Victor Churchill uses Kurobuta Berkshire Ham.

Method

• place the brown sugar, dried mustard, cider vinegar and maple syrup into a bowl and mix together unitl all the ingredients are combined to make the glaze.
• Use a small sharp knife and carefully remove the skin from the ham maning sure that the fat remains on the meat. Save the skin to cover the ham surface until you are ready to start glazing.
• Use a sharp knife to score the meat in a criss-cross (diamond) pattern and stud the centre of each diamond with a clove.
• Place the ham in a baking tray and pour over the glaze. Add a little water to cover the base of the pan.
• Bake the ham at 180C for approximately 30 minutes or until the outside of the ham has turned a golden brown colour. Baste the Kurobuta ham with a brush 4-5 times throughout the cooking process.

To serve

• Simply slice to serve. The ham is perfect hot or cold.
• The remaining glaze can be warmed and served with the sliced ham.

Have you ever experienced a butcher shop like this in the world?

Marbling in Wagyu ~ It’s what all the “cool people” are talking about

One taste and you will understand why wagyu beef is considered a delicacy. The meat produced from the black Tajima-ushi breed of  Japanese Wagyu cattle is unlike any other beef on the planet. It  behaves differently than any other beef  thanks to  its highly prized extensive inter-muscular fat or  ”marbling” as the culinary cool call it and the low heat required  at which this  fat will reach melting point . It’s these qualities  that give Wagyu meat its unique rich quality and succulent melt in the mouth texture.

This huge amount of fat is also the reason why when cooking a good slab of Wagyu steak it needs to be handled differently to a normal cut of beef. The fat that is found in a good cut of Wagyu may seem excessive to those who are concerned about eating a healthy well balanced diet, but in actual fact, Wagyu meat is high in unsaturated fats which means it  produces less energy or has fewer calories than other types of fat that you may find in the  other beef products like   butter and cream.  It is the chemical composition of  unsaturated fat  which is the reason why it melts at lower temperatures compared with saturated fats which are more solid at ambient temperatures and less prone to rancidity and have better keeping qualities, hence why food manufacturers love using high levels of them in processed foods.

Photo by Clkao

Wagyu meat is graded on a scale determined by the amount of inter- muscular fat it contains, the quality and color of the fat , the color of the meat and the meats texture. The higher the number, the better the quality. When choosing your slice of heaven, make sure to get advice from your butcher and do your homework, as the cost per kilo can be out of  reach of everyday dinners.

Below you will  find a recipe for a large  sirloin cut of Wagyu. The piece should weigh in excess of 700g and of the highest grade that your bank manager will allow. If you don’t own an induction cook top, you might want to try cooking in two pans, one inside the other to act as a heat diffuser and at the same time  have the flame or element set on the absolute lowest possible heat setting.

Bridget and Tetsuya on set with Wagyu

You can of course cook Wagyu by slicing into small pieces and frying gently as pictured to the right, or by cutting into paper thin slices and serving it Shabu Shabu style, but if your fortunate to have the opportunity to get your hands on the best, the method described below is worth re-mortgaging your house for. Enjoy!

The Ultimate Wagyu Beef Cooking Guidelines

Ingredients

1 slab of Wagyu Sirloin steak  700g-1kg in weight.

1 Tbsp of grapeseed oil

Sea salt flakes

Freshly ground black pepper

Fresh wasabi and soy sauce to serve

Method

• Before you start to prepare your wagyu, ensure that it has been stored in the coldest part of the refrigerator, covered completely in cling film. The meat needs to cooked straight from the fridge, as cold as possible to ensure the fat  renders gently.
• Carefully trim the external fat from around the outside of the Sirlion ~if this hasn’t already been done for you by your butcher. Keep the fat and render at a later stage by chopping into small chunks or mincing and placing into a small pot on induction setting 2 and leaving to gentle melt to a liquid. Drain through a fine seive and  store in the fridge to use in pastry cases, pie crusts, for frying and basting.
• Wrap the meat in cling film and put it back in to the fridge to chill again for at least one hour.
• Prepare the steak for frying by gently and carefully patting the steak dry with paper towles before covering every single inch of the larger cut sides of the steak with  ground natural sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper. Using a small knife, flatten the spices and gentle push into the flesh.
• Heat a large non stick heavy bottomed frying pan on induction setting 8 with 1 Tbsp of grapeseed oil until a light haze comes off the pan. Reduce the setting down to 7 and place the beef into the pan and cook on one side for 90 seconds to create a delicious crust on the outside. Flip the steak carefully and repeat. You want the outside of the steak to a be a beautiful caramelized brown, and it may require additional time if you are not using an induction cooktop.
• Set the induction cooktop onto heat setting 1, place a lid on the fry pan and allow the steak to ever so gentle cook for 45 minutes to an hour. There is no need to turn the heat up on the cook top as the heat captured in the pan with the lid on will create a very gentle yet very complete heat that is evenly distributed and warm enough to cook the steak through without shocking it so it looses all its fat.
• Once the cooking time is up, remove the steak from the pan and slice into mouth sized chunks. Serve  with fresh wasabi on top of each slice and a light soy sauce drizzled over top.
• Serves 4

How do you cook and serve your wagyu?

The beloved pork has suffered harshly in the last few years ~ with the terror that surrounded the Swine flu, and peoples  assumption that you could “catch” the swine flu from eating pork meat… False on all accounts! Pork has taken a hammering.

I grew up eating pork. It was a part of my weekly diet and came in abundant forms of thick juicy pork sausages, pork hock soup, bacon bone boil-ups and tender pork roasts. Pork crackling was always a treat fought fiercely over by me and my siblings.

One question I am frequently asked when doing cooking classes and demonstrations is how to achieve sensational pork crackling on the Sunday roast ~ to which I now have the definitive answer!

photo by gurms

I was fortunate enough to have recently spent time in the test kitchen of Electrolux Australia, where we probed the question of how to attain crackling success.

4 pork roasts, 4 pieces of pork fat and 4 different ovens later ~ the answer to the age old question of good crack is as follows.

Tip number 1

When choosing your pork for roasting, do so from a reputable meat supplier. The more in-depth knowledge that your butcher has over the beast they are selling, the better. Why? The best cracking comes from a female pig ~ so you want to secure your pork roast from a sow.

The female pig meat tends  to be sweeter than her male counterpart and also  have more fat under the skin ~ which is perfect for crackling!

Tip number 2

When choosing your pork roast, avoid purchasing meat that comes from intense farmed piggeries, but rather choose free- range and if possible organic. The meat will be more tender and relaxed and level of fat will be higher. Due to public demand, the pig breeder has been breeding pigs with less and less fat, so the meat is less tender and forgiving and the crackling harder to get right.

Tip number 3

Choose a pork roast with a good amount of rind still attached, and preferably start the following recipe the day before you intend to dine.

Pork Crack~ling

DAY ONE ~ preparation

Lay the pork roast on a chopping board, skin side facing you. Taking a sharp knife, make 5mm incisions in the pork fat ~ slicing down lengths ways. Cut the slices as close together as possible.

Lay the pork loin on a wire rack, skin side still facing upwards and pour 3 cups of boiling water mixed with 1/2 cup of glucose syrup over the fat. Pat the pork dry with a paper towel, and leave uncovered in your refrigerator overnight, as close to the fridge’s fan as possible to help the pork to dry out.

DAY TWO ~ time to roast

Remove the roast from the fridge at least 2 hours before you intend to cook it so it comes up to room temperature. Massage vegetable oil into the rind before seasoning  well with sea salt flakes, rubbing  the coarse salt into ALL the grooves you had previously sliced into the meat.  Try and get as much salt as you can into the grooves.

Preheat the oven on Fan Bake to 240 C/ 460F

Place the pork onto a wire rack with a  roasting tray underneath to collect  any drips and cook the pork  on 240C/ 460F  for 20 minutes before turning the oven down to 220C/ 430F and roasting  further.  The amount of time needed for roasting is dependent on the size of the roast and whether the roast has bones or not.

The rule of thumb is to allow 40-60 minutes per kilo, but a better way to determine when the roast is ready is when it has an internal core temperature of 71C / 160F and the crackling is good and CRISP! If you haven’t got a meat thermometer ~ it would be a worthwhile investment!

Allow the pork to rest on a wire rack, covered with aluminum foil for 20 minutes before slicing.

Enjoy!

Love these posts? Nominate Bridget Davis for a social media award in the Shorty Awards food category

With this episode of the 10min Foodie, I show you how you too can become a gourmet chef in under ten minutes.

Lemon Aioli
Like most things handmade, this great tasting aioli is well worth the extra effort.
250 mls of oil (use a non flavoured vegetable oil like sunflower, grapeseed or canola)
2 large egg yolks
2-4 teaspoons of lemon juice
2 roasted garlic cloves crushed ( optional, but recommened!)
2 raw garlic cloves crushed and finely chopped
Sea salt flakes
Freshly ground black pepper

Into a thoroughly clean bowl, place the egg yolks and 2 teaspoons of the lemon juice and whisk until well combined.
With great patience and a steady hand, slowly add the oil to the bowl, drip by drip whisking continuously. The process is call making an emmulsification which is necessary to produce a smooth thick dressing. Its also a great workout for the arms!
Once all the oil has been incorporated, add the garlic and whisk through. I recommend that you use a combination of roasted and raw garlic in the aioli as the roast garlic helps to balance out the flavour of the aioli without making it to spicy by using just raw garlic.
Season the aioli well with slat and pepper, tasting to see if you need to correct the flavour with more lemon juice or salt and pepper to taste.
Can be store covered in the fridge for 2-3 days.

Once upon a time… I began compiling recipe links that would flitter seductively past me in my twitter stream as I sat doodling and discussing the day’s happenings with friends and fellow foodies.

After much clicking and opening, I would downsize  my favourite  selection  to a manageable and rather appropriate

15 Top Recipe Posts.

Well I’m pleased to announce that keeping my selection contained to within 15 recipe posts is no longer achievable.

This post has seen my 15 Top Recipe Posts increase to 25 glorious offerings in order to share  as many of the high calibre resources  that I have been fortunate enough to click through to.

Listed below are my Top 25, but if you think I’ve missed something out, please feel free to let me know via twitter or direct email.

bridget(at)theinternetchef(dot)biz.

Happy dining!

Banana Pineapple Cake- Belachan2

Braised Char Siew-- House of Annie

Lime Square Bars- Evil Shenanigans

Kahlua Fudge Brownies- The Recipe Girl

Billionaires Bacon- Sauver

Vanilla and Rhubarb Jam- Food in Jars

Whiskey Ginger Ribs- Gastronomic Blog

Banana bread Ice cream- The Kitchen Illiterate

Spicy cilantro Peanut Slaw-Kalyn'sKitchen

Perfect MacnCheese- My Cooking Quest

Radicchio Salad- Fare To Remember

Tequila Marinade- The Parsley Thief

Very Good Chocolate Cake- A Yankee in...

Toasted Cheese Sandwich- Taste and Tell

Black Sesame Ice Cream- My Buttery Fingers

Lychee Granita- Seasaltwithfood

Juicy Lucy Burgers- Food Mayhem

Milliondollar Cake- A Yankee in Southern Kitch

Root Beer Cookies- Makes and Takes

Pear Butter-- Bittersweet Blog

Drunken spaghetti--The Cooking Photographer

Peanut chocolate caramel bars-- 17 and Baking

Dulce de leche- the easy way-- Pigpig's Corner

Cheesecake Brownies--Rosa's Yummy Yums

Millionaire's Shortbread-- Baking For The Cure

But perfection is in the mouth of the diner. People are as different as night and day when it comes to HOW they like their steak cooked.

One person’s rare steak is another person’s raw. One person’s beloved well done steak equates to another person’s tough old boot.

With this episode of the 10min Foodie, I cook for you the perfect medium rib eye or scotch fillet steak. But if you are a lover of other degrees of readiness use this link  to a steak doneness chart to help attain your nirvana.

An instant read thermometer plus following the simple guidelines on this foodeo will certainly assist you on your path to steak glory!

Recipes from the ‘Foodeo’

I chose 2 pieces of rib-eye (also known as scotch fillet steak), each piece weighing 250grams which is approximately a 9 ounce steak and the following recipe is enough for two servings.

Glorious Roasted Wedge Potatoes and Blanched Baby Carrots with a Herb Butter

For two people, you will needed 4 large potatoes, cut up into wedges.

Place the wedges in an oven tray in a single layer with a generous grinding of black pepper,sprinkling of sea salt, a light drizzle of olive oil and some finely chopped fresh thyme.

Cook them in a preheated oven on 200C or 400F, for 25 minutes and then take them out, turn the wedges over to crisp up in the oven for a further 20 minutes. Once they are golden, remove from the oven.

Prepare 1 bunch of baby carrots by removing the green tops and tipping the tail off with a small knife. Carefully peel down the length of the carrots- avoiding fingers!

Bring to the boil a medium sized pot of water with a pinch of salt and plunge the carrots into to the water for 5 minutes until tender to the touch. Drain the carrots well.

Make the herb butter by chopping 50 grams or 2 ounces of butter in to small cubes and zapping quickly in the microwave for 10 seconds, just to get the butter soft. Add 1 Tablespoon of freshly chopped thyme, a grinding of  black pepper and a pinch of sea salt flakes and mix through the butter with a fork until well combined.

Use the above combination’s as I did in the foodeo for a stunning steak dinner or you may like to use some of the following ideas to accompany that perfectly cooked steak of yours!

Creamy garlic mashed potatoes with a fresh green salad

Lightly blanched green beans and broccolini

Baked potato or roast potato with lightly steamed asparagus

Tender roasted portobello mushroom with a mixed leaf salad

Creamy potato salad with barbecued corn cobs