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| Just personal experience here, so FWIW. I did touch on this in a comment in a thread above (before I read your post).
I think aging is a compromise between steaks and roasts and hamburger. Aging, again IMHO, really improves steaks. And, my experience is all the way from eating moose, caribou, sheep, etc. in my hunting days to feeding a whole lot of corn-fed cattle in feedlots. After we returned to the farm and started feeding cattle, we would compromise on how long to hang the carcasses, as the hamburger, to us, didn't taste as good when aged too long. And, taking it out of the freezer meant using it pretty much immediately if the carcass was aged.
While aging is generally thought to be good for well finished beef, it will also improve meat that carries very little fat, IMHO. I related in that previous post how we treated sheep meat when on a float trip. With moose, we would often hang the carcasses and cut off what we wanted each night too. Every day the place we cut off would crust over and seal back up. If flies were bad, early in the season, we would carry large tins (bulk) of pepper to coat the meat - paying close attention to getting the pepper into any cracks in the hanging meat. Every day it hung it got better. Interestingly, the first moose my (new at that time) wife cooked was one that I say traveling at a brisk clip across the mountainside from about 2-3 miles away. I knew where all the paths led in that country, and when my hunter shot the big bull (rack in the mid 60s), all he could see was hair in the scope. The meat was burgundy red from running - and it froze overnight. That meat never got a chance to age - and with the blood in the meat like that, it needed aging. My wife stewed the T-bone steaks. Taste was fine, but you couldn't chew it any other way. One time, a new hunter arrived in camp, and when I loaded the track machine to move to the outpost, I rolled a moose neck out from under the plywood shack. The weather had been rainy for days, and I had shoved it under the shack to keep it out of the rain. The piece of neck was steel gray from the rainy weather. The hunter asked what I was going to do with that? I said that it was camp meat. He laughed and laughed at the joke. When we finally arrived at the outpost, and I got everything unloaded, I grabbed the piece of neck and hauled it up on the deck. Again he asked what I was doing with it. But he was hungry when dinner came. He watched me trim off all the steel gray coating and cut steaks off the bright red meat underneath. Even the neck meat was reasonably tender when we ate it. (One note too - I learned early on to never fry meat slowly on low heat. You have to get the pan really hot - hot enough to make a mess when you put the meat in the pan.)
Anyway, again, FWIW, those are a few of my experiences. | |
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Aging meat
