Courtesy: Davin & Loren Waite of Wrench & Rodent Seabasstropub Oceanside, CA
When you think about dry aging, often red meats like beef come to mind. What many people don’t think about is dry aged fish. Normal fridge products degrade with time, in a dry ager the product improves with time, this applies to fish too. Dry aging your fish is a great way to evoke unique flavours creating a completely different taste all together.
How to produce dry aged fish
Many people are reluctant to dry age their product but dry aging is not as scary or as hard as one may think. Steak Locker have created a specially designed dry age fridge that eliminates the risk and difficulties associated with dry aging allowing you to create delicious dry aged fish products. This step by step recipe aims to help you discover how to dry age your fish in a Steak Locker to maximise its flavours.
Step 1: Remove scales
Remove scales with a knife so there are no pockets for bacteria to hide. We personally like to spray the fish skin with distilled vinegar and then wipe it dry.
Step 2: Guts and gills
The next step we have is to take the guts and gills out carefully. By this we mean leave the fish as close to whole as you can. This will ensure that any “trim” will be close to what you would normally trim from your fish. That being said, short term dry aged fish skin is amazing and crisps up beautifully due to the reduced water content.
Tip: If you leave the head on and you start with good fish the eye will remain clear if your process is correct.
Step 3: Quick results with less loss
With dry aged fish you can get amazing results much faster than with beef. Because of this there is much less loss, some larger fish can be aged to extremes. However, when aging anything to extremes it is important to consider the law of diminishing returns that applies to dry aging.
Step 4: Timeline
Even at a week or 2 you will have something truly unique and special and around 30 days you will get beautiful funky, fruity and even nutty notes. The fish and fat flavors will become more complex. We have gone as far as 100 days on bluefin tuna and the result was like nothing we have ever tasted, in a good way. Around 50 days is the maximum time we would want to leave our dry aged fish in the Steak Locker for a Salmon. On the other hand for smaller dry aged fish we would recommend as few as 15 days.
Step 5: Cleaning your fridge
Always wipe the locker out after completion of your dry aged fish. The best way to clean it properly is with baking soda, vinegar and water solution. Once you have wiped the inside down, turn off your dry age refrigerator and air it out with the door open for a day or two. Don’t forget to change the yellow filter if needed.
Summary of dry aged fish
So, there you have it. The best practises we suggest when dry aging your fish with Steak Lockers meat aging fridge. We can assure you that the results of your dry aged fish will be incredible, most importantly we doubt you have tried anything like this before. If you do happen to try it out for yourself, please let us know and tag us in the results on social media. We can’t wait to see what you come up with. You can read more of Steak Lockers recipes for their dry aged fridge products in the blog.
