These days, things are a little better. Sure there may be the odd cucumber hidden under a bag of mushrooms in the vegetable crisper that liquefies before I realise, but on the whole, I tend to be better at cycling through the food on a quick enough rotation that nothing goes off.
That is until now.
Inspired by the success of the sous vide chops, I decided to give steak a go. But of course, I'm not just going to go and whack in any old steak. That's not my way. Instead, I'm going dry age it first.
If you're not familiar with dry aging meat - and I wasn't until relatively recently when I saw Alton Brown do it on an old episode of Good Eats (Porterhouse Rules) - you basically leave a fairly thick steak to dry out in the fridge for a week before cooking it.
The process is fairly straight-forward. Buy a thick cut of steak, I'm talking 5cm (2 inches) or more. You'll probably need to go to an actual butcher for this, but you could try and ask your supermarket butcher if he'll cut you one.
Once you get that bad boy home, wrap it up in a layer of newspaper, pop it on a wire cake rack on a plate and leave it for 24 hours. Replace the newspaper, flip it and leave it for another 24hrs. Repeat this process until the newspaper stops being wet and icky. Once you get to that stage, leave it for two to three weeks. I wouldn't recommend going any higher than this unless you get a really thick cut. The longer you leave it, the dryer it'll become, and you don't want it so dry it's ruined.
Once it's ready, you'll want to slice off the outer crust. It's going to look disgusting on the outside, but inside it should be beautiful and bright red.
Now we sous vide. Heat your water to the desired temperature (58-60°C for medium/medium-rare). Vacuum seal the steak, or in my case, poor-man vacuum seal it (go read the sous vide chops for more info) and immerse that baby for a solid two hours. I found that less than that and the fat and connective tissue is still chewy.
A few minutes before the steak is ready, heat a frying pan (or griddle).
Take the steak out, give it a pat with a paper towel to make sure there's no moisture. Give it a sprinkle of salt and pepper. Drop a good-sized dollop of butter in the pan, a quick squirt of vegetable oil and then. Wait until the butter is mostly melted and bubbling, then put the steak on. Give it about 20-30 seconds on each side and serve.
I like a simple garden salad with my steak. I like the steak to be the centre of attention, and when we're dealing with a hunk of meat that's nearly 2 inches thick..there's not much room for anything else.
One thing I should point out. When you cook meat sous vide, you don't need to rest it like you would if you were cooking it over direct heat (ala grilling). Resting it lets the liquid state fats etc. return to a thicker state, thus trapping the moisture in the meat and not running out over your plate when you cut it. When you cook at low temperature this isn't as big an issue.