At The Butchers Club, we pride ourselves on serving world-class meat and sustainable seafood. Our beef is sourced from a farm that we have partnered with in New South Wales, Australia that specifically rears the cows to our specifications for use in our venues. Dry-aged beef is at the centre of our entire operation and it is something that we have perfected over years of practice.
The process of dry-ageing beef has proved successful on an international level for centuries. Large pieces of beef, known as primals, are stored in a climate-controlled room, where the temperature and humidity are kept very low and the air circulation very high.
Each piece of beef is hand-dried, wrapped in a thin, dry cloth to remove the excess blood and moisture, and then placed on a wire-rack shelf in our own dry-ageing facility in Tin Wan to dry-age. Each piece will be rotated daily and moved to a different part of the fridge on a weekly basis, depending on how long it is due to age. We use salt as a desiccant and an industrial strength dehumidifier to regulate the humidity to approximately 75-80%, and we keep the temperature at around 0-2 degrees Celsius. A couple of large fans are placed on both sides of the room and run 24 hours a day to keep the air flowing around the meat.
We age our beef for a minimum of 30 days and can leave it to age for as long as our customers would like. During the ageing process, a hard and mouldy crust forms on the outer surface of the beef, which both protects the meat on the inside from harmful bacteria, at the same time as developing the flavour of the beef.
Three distinct things occur during this process: