The Experiment. To start my testing, I decided to follow the basic Cook’s Illustrated/Alton Brown protocol: take fresh steaks, wrap them in several layers of cheesecloth or paper towels, place them on a rack in the back of the fridge, and let them sit for up to four days.

Dry-aged beef has a remarkable depth of flavor, but it can be expensive and hard to come by. The good news is that if you have a refrigerator, you can dry-age beef at home.

Beef needs to be aged for at least 14 days for enzymes to properly tenderize fibers, and needs to be aged for at least 21 days for complex flavors to develop. One week in a fridge—cheesecloth or no cheesecloth—won’t make that happen. Instead, dry-aging takes dedicated equipment, time, and large, primal cuts.

Dry-rubbed steak. Put the steak on a wire rack (so it and the koji can breathe), place the rack on a sheet pan, and refrigerate. After about 12 hours, the meat will look like a snowy slab as the enzymes break down the flesh and turn brown. Leave for a full for 48 hours.

Here’s the thing – leaving your steak uncovered in a domestic refrigerator for 1-3 days is not really dry aging it. Dry aged meats require very specific conditions in order to do their thing, and you can only properly dry age larger sub-primal cuts, not individual steaks (you can read the article to learn why).

three to five days

How long does raw steak last in the refrigerator? After steak is purchased, it may be refrigerated for 3 to 5 days – the “sell-by” date on the package may expire during that storage period, but the steak will remain safe to use after the sell by date if it has been properly stored.

People who eat rancid meat are likely to get sick. Like any other old, spoiled food, bad meat can make you sick. If the meat has been contaminated with something pathogenic, like bacteria or toxins, it can make you sick.

For sell-by dates that go past at home, you can continue to store the food for a short amount of time depending on what it is. Some common products are: ground meat and poultry (1-2 days past the date), beef (3-5 days past the date), eggs (3-5 weeks past the date).

Raw ground beef should be bright red on the outside and brownish on the inside. If its surface has turned thoroughly brown or gray or grown mold, it has gone bad and should be discarded.

While it isn’t recommended to check for spoiled steak by tasting, meat that has gone bad will have a rancid taste. If your steak tastes extremely sour or bitter, it’s definitely gone bad.

Eating rare steak will not cause food poisoning if kitchen utensils used to cook it are kept clean, it is claimed. The bacteria only survived where the steaks were touched by utensils that were not cleaned after being used to handle raw meat, researchers found. …