aj said:
The key to good meat is hanging it an extra week.
i can back this up with facts. i posted this on another website. it's pretty easy to get tenderness gene results by that extra week and on down the line. pretty amazing.
in the paper
"association of a single nucleotide polymorphism in the calpastatin gene with carcass and meat quality traits of beef cattle" by schenkel et al there is a table. remember, this is only for one gene and measures all 3 allele types. also, remember, a tough steak is rated as one that is 5.7 kg on shear force test or 12.54 pounds. you can see that if you have the CC allele, you barely have a tender steak for this one gene at two days, but at JUST 7 days hanging, the worst carcass is better than the best carcass at two days! even more dramatic at 14 days. i haven't seen any data on carcasses with homozygosity at all three alleles compared to the no star carcasses. can one have negative tenderness? in the end, perhaps it just means one can save on energy in the locker and have the best tenderness at 7 days the same as 21 days. pretty amazing.
here is the table. x is shear force at days post mortem
y is the genotype and units are kg force. (variation not shown)
2 7 14 21
CC 5.55 5.03 4.23 3.67
CG 5.81 5.13 4.39 3.95
GG 6.06 5.41 4.44 3.87
they have a unit called SFLavg which kinda groups the differences altogether in one number, but i like the table as it shows, as usual, a practice window to excel.
also of note, one could purchase lower cost, low star carcasses and sell them as premium simply by aging and get a similar product depending on how the star carcass was handled. REMEMBER, this is only for one gene.
so it would seem that all you have to do is age the carcass 7 days to get under the magic 5.7 kg. that's a huge difference between on the 2 and 7 day time points, but dramatically gets smaller the longer you age. no one really ages that long without a little hassle (21 days), ie drier aging units to remove moisture so mold doesn't build up, wrapping the carcass with cheesecloth to make mold removal easier. also, quartering the carcass wastes an excellent steak. someone told me yesterday that they would feed carcasses at cost for the profit they make off of offal for a period of time to hold them over during tough price points. a guy at the feed store told me the other day he had one age for a month, but it had lots of mold, but after cleaning it up, he said it was the most tender beef he had ever had. going to go ask a local butcher today about their dry aging.
ps, there is one other paper i am trying to read which i lost for other markers with real data. airhead moment. i'll try and find that one.
PS again. would like to know if this is what safeway does with ranchers reserve and if it's cheaper for them to purchase the cheaper carcasses, hand required number of days and sell it at a premium called "ranchers reserve" rather than paying up front for better quality carcasses.