ERD50
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
The meat actually loses (water) weight through dry-aging anyway. ...
Yes, but not in a way that matters to cost or taste. If you read the 'Serious Eats' articles posted earlier, Kenji seems to take a very scientific, carefully controlled approach to this, with blind tastings.
What he found (through careful measurements of the density of the aged meat) was that it was the outer crust that dries, and that outer crust gets cut away anyhow. So the meat you serve has the same water content as non-aged. Of course, having to cut that part away adds to the cost, but the drying isn't an effect on the the finished product cost/#.
He also found that 'aging' an individual steak for a day or so in the fridge did lose moisture content and that did allow it to brown better/faster, since the surface moisture was driven off, but by the time cooking was complete, the densities were the same.
Or, they could read this article from Cooks Illustrated indicating you can dry age steaks at home.
" so we pan-seared the home-aged steaks and tasted them alongside a batch of the same commercially dry-aged cuts costing $19.99 per pound. Our findings? Sure enough, four days of dry-aging in a home fridge gave the steaks a comparably smoky flavor and dense, tender texture."
I don't see any evidence of blind tastes, or controlled conditions as the Serious Eats guy does. His science looks sound to me, I'll take that over Cooks Kitchen saying you 'can do it'. Especially when they seem to be saying there is no difference between 4 days for a steak and the long aging that full cuts get (" you can skip shelling out extra money for commercially aged cow. "). There just is not going to be the same enzyme breakdown in 4 days.
-ERD50