A little something from Harold Mcgee, one of the foremost food scientists out there…
This feature comes from “Lucky Peach #2: The Sweet Spot.” Pick up a subscription here.
Proteins, carbohydrates, and fats are the building blocks of living things, but they don’t have much flavor in their natural state. They are bland to begin with. That’s why we cook them, why we season them, why we transform them—to make them more appealing to us.
But sometimes we can get our food to make itself more delicious, by treating it in a way that creates favorable conditions for the enzymes that are already in the food to work together in a certain fashion.
Enzymes are molecules that exist in foods—and in microbes intimately involved with food—that can transform those basic, bland building blocks. They’re nano-cooks—the true molecular cooks. Dry-aging, ripening, and fermentation are all processes that take advantage of enzymes to make foods delicious before cooking.
Most meat, by contrast, is prepared for the market very quickly. The animal is slaughtered, the various parts of the muscle system are separated and packaged, and then they’re distributed. That’s about it.
Dry-aging beef means that once the animal is slaughtered and butchered, portions of the carcass are allowed to rest in very carefully controlled conditions (cool temperatures with relatively high humidity) for a period of time—often several weeks, and sometimes up to a couple of months.
