Dry-aging is a traditional butchery process to store whole carcasses or unpackaged primals or sub-primals under a controlled environment for a certain period of time. Despite the fact dry-aging is a costly process because of decreased yields and greater weight losses during aging and trimming, it has been widely practiced in many local meat processors, high-end restaurants and gourmet markets. This is mainly due to its known positive effects on enhancing beef palatability attributes, particularly generating unique flavor characteristics, such as brown-roasted beefy/brothy, buttery, nutty/roasted nut, and/or sweet flavor.
But several published studies actually found no significant impact of dry-aging on eating quality attributes of beef. The primary reason for this inconsistent result could be because of the improper/uncontrolled processing condition applied for dry-aging. In fact, the optimal dry-aging regimes compiling the essential processing environment components have not been clearly established. Therefore, in our study we compared various essential dry-aging factors (temperature, humidity and air-flow) and their subsequent effects on meat quality attributes of beef loins. Further, using a novel metabolomics approach, we investigated the metabolites differences of dry-aged and wet-aged beef, with particular emphasis on flavour precursors.