Dry-ageing gracefully
A NORDIC-STYLE steakhouse in Adelaide has perfected a process for beef that turbocharges flavour.
IT is a glorious late autumn day in Adelaide. The sun is shining, leaves are falling, the red wine flowing and the rib-eye on our plates is easily one of the most flavour-packed steaks I’ve ever eaten.
I’m sitting on the veranda of the restaurant A Hereford Beefstouw in fashionable inner-city Hutt Street, sampling a rather special type of grass-fed beef. Unlike most restaurant steaks, this one has been dry-aged on the bone for more than 30 days, a type of processing of meat that was once common, now almost lost in the name of progress.
It has taken the owner of A Hereford Beefstouw, Tim Burvill, several years of false starts to get to this point. For a winemaker with no farming or restaurateur experience, Burvill and his wife Sarah have done well on their paddock-to-plate journey, from breeding a herd of cattle to export specifications in South Australia’s lush South East, to learning how to hang and dry-age sides of beef in controlled conditions.
Burvill, 38, was a winemaker who specialised in whites at Penfolds until 2000, when he lost his job after the Rosemount takeover. So he started his own wine label, RockBare (since sold) and decided to try his hand at farming, buying a small property in the Adelaide Hills in 2001.
“It was an absolute wreck and there were old cars and washing machines and crap all over the property,” Burvill says. “We got the farm up and running again and started a small herd of mostly dairy cows.”
They then settled on breeding Hereford cattle, simply because they liked the look of them and knew they had good genetics.
But it was thanks to his winemaking business that things didn’t go quite to plan. In 2004, after a referral by an Austrade official in Brussels, the socks and sandals-wearing Danish restaurateur Lars Damgaard walked into Burvill’s office to inquire about purchasing some of his reds. Damgaard’s family had opened a restaurant in Herning, south of Copenhagen 40 years ago and the business — A Hereford Beefstouw steakhouse — had since expanded to 15 outlets across Denmark, Sweden and Greenland. On the menu — exclusively Australian Hereford beef.
The pair became friends and during one of their meetings Burvill offered to sell his cattle to Damgaard’s restaurants. So he obtained an export license and sent off the first container-load in 2006. It was, however, “an absolute disaster” because processing costs had risen and profits were non-existent for the cuts required.
“I rang Lars and said “sorry, it’s not going to work”, and Lars said he would cover it,” says Burvill. “It was about $15,000.”
Burvill rejigged his model and ended up selling close to $2 million worth of cuts to Denmark.
With expansion plans on their mind, the Burvills sold their house and their hills property and invested in a farm in the South East with Damgaard in 2007. That went well until the dollar rose in 2008, making their meat too costly.
It was crunch time. Damgaard and the Burvills sat down at Hutt St restaurant Chianto Classico to discuss the future, when the Dane suggested they partner and open A Hereford Beefstouw in Adelaide.
“I thought if we’re going to make it work let’s do it with someone with 40 years of experience,” Burvill says. “We walked out the door and there was a For Lease sign on the building opposite.”
It was the grand, bluestone, heritage-listed Christian Women’s Temperance Union building — a blank canvas in design terms, which could be gutted and refitted Danish-style with minimalist architecture and classic Nordic timber furniture. A steakhouse, with a big list of red wines, in a former temperance union building? The irony was not lost on the would-be purchasers, either.
To the Burvills, it seemed like a natural progression — from wine to breeding cattle and then finding a market for their premium product. But Sarah Burvill says family members questioned their venture and even sent them articles on failures.
“When we opened it there wasn’t anyone saying great, that’s fantastic, congratulations,” Sarah says. “It was more like ‘Jesus Christ, what in the hell are you doing?’”.
More than two and a half years on the restaurant is a success, with a steady clientele of businessmen chasing a good steak at lunch. Yes, it’s a steakhouse, but a contemporary one with on-trend Nordic design — tables are European maple — soft cloth napkins from Denmark and serious bespoke steak knives.
And then there’s the meat: various cuts of pricey dry-aged Hereford beef: the 400g rump starts at $36, the 400g New York-style sirloin on the bone at $45.
Burvill talks about dry ageing with the zeal of a recent convert. “It gives the meat an almost sweet flavour,” he says. His beef is aged at his partner butcher store, My Butcher, for between 30 and 45 days: 20 days’ hanging is considered the minimum required for the necessary breaking down of the collagen fibres and tendons vital to tenderness.
For reasons of economy, most beef these days is killed one day, refrigerated for 24 hours and then portioned and put in vacuum-sealed cryovac packaging. The beef ages on the inside — in a process known as wet ageing — and is preserved in its freshest state. But “fresh”, in terms of beef, does not necessarily equate with flavour.
Chef Neil Perry, of Rockpool Bar & Grill, says dry ageing means everything to beef because it enhances flavour, allows enzymes and gasses relating to the rotting process to escape, tenderises the meat and allows the side to mature.
Perry’s three restaurants each use dry aged beef and at any one stage, he has $450,000 worth of meat ageing in his cool rooms.
“Dry ageing increases the intensity of flavour and it’s really important to have complete control over it,” he says.
Perry says while wet ageing means meat can last for long periods, the cut loses much of its moisture when opened from its cryovac seal.
“Sadly 97 per cent of Australian meat is wet aged,” he says.
“Dry ageing is better for the meat, it’s improving the flavour. Wet ageing is destroying it.”
Dry ageing costs. My Butcher owner Tony Buckley says the ageing process and having to cut off the outer layers results in a loss of about 50 per cent of the side’s weight, meaning it is twice as expensive to produce than wet-aged meats.
As well as the restaurant, the Burvills are now selling their meat to several uptown supermarkets in SA and the Jacob’s Creek Visitor Centre’s restaurant.
And the future? The couple is aiming to double beef production in partnership with My Butcher and open a branch of A Hereford Beefstouw in Melbourne. So the business is dry-ageing gracefully, you might say.
A few other restaurants where you can eat dry-aged steak:
Rockpool Bar and Grill, Perth, Melbourne, Sydney
Prime Restaurant, Sydney
Fibber McGee’s, Perth
The Point, Melbourne
Pure South, Melbourne
Steer Bar & Grill, Melbourne
Blackbird, Brisbane
*This month and next, Aria Sydney’s lunch menu will feature dry-aged beef from owner Matt Moran’s family farm