I doubted dry aging at home until I tried a dedicated fridge

For years I thought dry aging needed a fancy setup or a pro shop. Last winter I got a used 4.2 cubic foot mini fridge off Craigslist for $60 and rigged a small fan inside. After 21 days with a whole ribeye roast, the crust was firm and the inside had that deep, nutty flavor I only got from expensive steakhouses. The key was keeping humidity around 80 percent with a simple salt water tray, no special controller. It beat my old method of just wrapping in cloth and hoping for the best, which always ended up drying out the edges too much. Anyone else tried a budget fridge setup, and how do you handle the smell in your garage?

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the_drew8d ago

That $60 Craigslist score is the way to go, no question. I did almost the same thing two summers ago with a beat up dorm fridge, wired in a cheap computer fan from an old tower, and ran it at about 38 degrees for a 30 day ribeye. The salt tray trick works great, I used a small plastic container with pickling salt and water and it held right around 80 percent without me touching it. For the garage smell, I stuffed a bowl of baking soda in there plus a box of activated charcoal from the pet store, and it knocked it down a lot. My first batch without any of that smelled like a gym sock for a week, lesson learned. The nutty flavor after 30 days blew my mind compared to the cloth wrapped mess I used to make.

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