{ DRY-AGING BEEF } Sometimes I get e-mails from readers that say something along the lines of, “You said one thing in article X, and then a couple years later, in article Y, you said almost the complete opposite What gives? Don’t you believe in science, and doesn’t science deal in facts?” There’s only one kind of science that isn’t open to contradicting itself: the bad kind Science by definition needs to be open to considering and accepting contradictory evidence and redefining “facts.” Heck, if new theories weren’t allowed to be formed or conclusions debunked with further experimentation, we’d still believe in crazy things like spontaneous generation, static universes, and even that searing meat seals in juices And then where would we be? I bring this up because I once went through great pains to test and explain precisely why you cannot dry-age meat at home—no way, nohow But now I’m going to explain to you exactly how you can dry-age at home, how relatively simple it is, and how it can vastly improve the eating quality of your steaks and roasts to the point that they are better than what you can buy at even the best gourmet supermarket Now before you call up the National Committee of Good Science and send them to confiscate my calculator (by which I mean my head), let me explain that I still stand by 100 percent of what I wrote earlier: if you are starting with individual steaks, dry-aging at home is not feasible When I tried dry-aging steaks at home, blind tasting showed that between the first day and the seventh day of such aging, there was absolutely zero perceptible improvement in the eating quality of the steaks But we all know that individual steaks is not how meat is dry-aged by professionals, right? They start with whole subprimals—large cuts of meat with bones and fat caps fully intact, aging them uncovered in temperature-, humidity,and airflow-controlled rooms designed to allow them to age for weeks or months without rotting The question is, how ... simple it is, and how it can vastly improve the eating quality of your steaks and roasts to the point that they are better than what you can buy at even the best gourmet supermarket Now before you call up the National Committee of Good... individual steaks, dry-aging at home is not feasible When I tried dry-aging steaks at home, blind tasting showed that between the first day and the seventh day of such aging, there was absolutely zero...contradicting itself: the bad kind Science by definition needs to be open to considering and accepting contradictory evidence and redefining “facts.” Heck, if new theories weren’t allowed to be formed or conclusions debunked with