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"  My meaty mettle has seldom been doubted, even by my harshest detractors \u2014 and there are a lot of them. I have therefore been loathe to put a scourge in their hands by admitting something of which I am sorely ashamed: I don&amp;#039;t really like dry-aged beef.  Yes, it&amp;#039;s true. Just as I managed to alienate all progressive-thinking meat-eaters by agitating against grass-fed beef, with its gnarly texture and austere, spartan, unlovely flavor, now I&amp;#039;m going to turn the conservatives against me by saying that I don&amp;#039;t love dry-aged beef, at least not in the form I usually encounter it.  Let&amp;#039;s look at dry-aged beef: You take a steer carcass, you cut it up into pieces, and you put those pieces in a big, cold room with a fan on. The pieces dry out and get smaller. That&amp;#039;s good so far. The pieces also rot slowly as the enzymes inside its cells break down the cell walls and turn proteins into amino acids, which give the meat that appetizingly metallic/&amp;quot;mineral&amp;quot; taste you hear people talk about. (Blood has a similar taste.) There&amp;#039;s a somewhat poignant biomechanical irony in that the enzymes that break down are ones the steer uses for breaking down proteins, so in a sense it all comes around in the end. Again: so far, so good. The breaking down of the proteins makes the meat tender, and the dehydration concentrates the steak flavor powerfully. But that rotting process, after a couple of weeks, diminishes my pleasure from eating beef, and that&amp;#039;s not something I can easily abide. I don&amp;#039;t like Roquefort cheese. Nor do I swoon for rankness, gaminess, the musky scent of sweat socks, or the pungent residue of mold. I just don&amp;#039;t. Beef lovers like my friend Nick Solares, aka the Beef Aficianado, mock me for this. And I have to take it. The sweetness of fat and flesh, the piquant tang of crust and salt and yielding soft pink \u2014 none of these things derive from dry-aging; at its best, the process focuses and concentrates those flavors on the palate. Once it starts adding its own flavors to it, I say the hell with it. I don&amp;#039;t put Gorgonzola or Limburger cheese on a hamburger; in fact, if I was any kind of a real guy, I wouldn&amp;#039;t even put American cheese on it.  It&amp;#039;s true that dry-aging does wonders for texture, but only because the steaks that are most likely to be dry-aged \u2014 strips and ribs \u2014 are already tender. I would say, if you&amp;#039;re going to dry-age something, it ought to be a tough cut like hangar, but there&amp;#039;s not enough fat on it. &amp;quot;Wet-aged&amp;quot; meat, which is to say meat right out of the bag from the plant, gets an aged taste if it sits around long enough, but not the kind you want. Two weeks in the box will get me what I need from a steak, and that&amp;#039;s good enough for me. Is it good enough for you? If not, maybe you don&amp;#039;t like steak as much as I do. MORE OZERSKY ON EAT LIKE A MAN: \u2022 Alton Brown, Man v. Food, and the Rise of TV Gluttony \u2022 The Most Overrated Burger in America \u2022 Inside Mario Batali&amp;#039;s Eataly PLUS: The Esquire Almanac of Steak &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/a8746/dry-aged-beef-josh-ozersky-102010/>