Should I dry brine a ribeye that's been dry aged for 28 days?

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Jefft5301

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Original poster
Jul 22, 2020
1
0
My friend and I are conducting an experiment: buy a whole ribeye roast, cut part off to cook immediately, split the reamining, put one into Umai dry age bag, vacuum pack the other and freeze until the dry age completes. Then, we want to cut steaks off each, and prepare them identically for a true side by side test. Our dilemma is we follow Jeff's recipe and dry brine our steaks with kosher salt for at least 4 hours. In this experiment, should we also dry brine the dry aged steaks?

What do you think?

Jeff
 
I wouldn't, why mess around with a nice aged chunk of beef?
In my mind, if I'm going to age a steak, I want it to taste like an aged steak, dry brine changes the taste and texture of the meat. I'm only going to dry brine cheaper cuts of beef, that are known to be tough.
 
I'll elaborate on my previous post of "Yes."

I have a small dry aging fridge and have aged a variety of loins. The longest aging I've done was 55 days; while the meat looks dry internally, there's enough moisture for the dry brine to work - there is no salt visibly on the surface of a steak after a few hours and the meat is seasoned throughout.

I think I tried grilling one of my early aged steaks without a dry brine but it's been a while and I'm not totally confident that I did - if I did and it turned out better than the dry brined steaks, i certainly wouldn't have continued dry brining!

I will also say that dry brining doesn't seem to be as effective on dry aged roasts as it is on "fresh roasts".

Also, I have Aaron Franklin's book on steak; he's a big proponent of dry brining and dry aging for most cuts of steak. He did a number of experiments for the book, including comparing bringing steaks to room temperature vs. cooking straight from the fridge, but i don't remember if he compared dry brined vs. not with dry aged meat and I'm too lazy to dig into the book too see. Btw, he determined that letting the steak come to room temp before coming made a little difference in cooking time but no difference in the end result.
 
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