Meat aficionados simply adore dry-aged beef because it makes for the world’s best steaks. Americans have been producing dry-aged beef (beef aged on the bone) for years. And now Germans are discovering this venerable process.
A cold breeze wafts in from the locker, and Zwiener breathes this air in through his nose. “The aroma, that’s our secret,” he says. The locker smells of ham, musk, fresh baked yeast buns, hoarfrost, and sweaty wool socks – all at the same time. It’s a smell that’s at once compelling and repulsive. A smell that steak enthusiasts love and that sets off alarm bells in the minds of German food inspectors. It’s the smell of the more than one hundred sides of beef that are aging in the locker: the smell of Black Angus USDA Prime steaks that are aging at a temperature of exactly 3 °C and 80 percent humidity.
The acid test
Mr. Zwiener lifts a side of beef off a metal shelf and runs his hand over the spine: “This one’s 28 days old now and is ready to serve.” The meat, which is as black as blood sausage and as hard as the crust of a hard roll, is covered with fuzzy white mould. “Nice, huh?” Mr. Zwiener says.
All butchers used to age their meat this way, i.e. dry and on the bone. The mould kills the bacteria, but there was a constant fear that the bone marrow would go mouldy and the muscle mass would go bad.
But then, in the early 20th century, vacuum packing was discovered, which meant that butchers needed no longer fear that their meat would go bad. And they made more money, since dry-aging resulted in evaporation of much of the moisture in the meat, and the beef shrinks. Before the beef was sold, the butcher had to pare away the outer layer of the meat, which had become hard, mouldy and thus unusable. A side of beef can lose up to one third of its weight during the dry-aging process – a loss butchers recoup via the prices they charge for beef.
When a steak is vacuum packaged, it loses no weight, but in the airless atmosphere bacteria grows, lactic acid is produced, and the meat takes on a slightly metallic flavour.
In New York, dry-aged beef is readily available and Mr. Zwiener’s restaurants are full every night. Born in Bremen, Germany, Mr. Zwiener came to the U.S. half a century ago at the age of 20. He started out as a waiter at the Hilton, and then went on to work for Peter Luger, which was one of New York’s top steak restaurants. The tips were good there, as were the steaks, and Mr. Zwiener ended up doing a 40-year stint at the restaurant, where he eventually worked his way up to head waiter.
But then, in 2004, Zwiener stole Luger’s secret dry-aging process and opened his own restaurant, Wolfgang’s, on Park Avenue. He then opened a second branch in Manhattan, plus one each in Beverly Hills and on Waikiki. “Luger was none too pleased,” says Zwiener.
Super bulls
After guiding his Chevy into his herd of cattle, Phil Trowbridge rolls down his window and says, “Moo!” The cows stare at him, and Trowbridge says, “See that fat one there?”, pointing to a black cow standing right in front of the car. “We can make a really good dry-aged steak out of him.” Trowbridge, a 50-year-old Angus cow breeder, wears a cowboy hat and checked shirt. His 160 cattle are grazing peacefully on Hudson Valley pastureland. Trowbridge makes a living selling breeding bulls in the Midwest, where the prairies are huge and the herds run to thousands of heads. This is where the sides of beef that age in Wolfgang Zwiener’s cold storage locker come from. Trowbridge knows all of his cows by name, helps them to give birth to their calves, and in winter builds walls to protect them against the wind so that they don’t freeze to death. Trowbridge says that he wants to produce good food, and that’s why he breeds Angus cows; and that’s why he’s glad that his beef is dry-aged rather than being dried in plastic bags. “I want butchers to gasp in delight when the truck shows up with my beef.”
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