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Brad Makes Dry-Aged Steak | It’s Alive

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Brad Leone trades his usual fermentation experiments for a mini-fridge full of aging beef in episode 62 of “It’s Alive.”

Bon Appétit’s resident ferment guy is back, and this time he’s not brewing kombucha or hot sauce — he’s aging meat. Episode 62 sends Brad Leone out to Long Island before bringing the operation back to the Condé Nast test kitchen, where two Brooklyn butchers help him turn office equipment into a functioning dry-aging chamber. It’s the kind of stunt that only works on “It’s Alive”: half science lesson, half low-key act of building-code defiance.

• Leone tours Prime Food Distributor (PFD NY) on Long Island to see how professional purveyors manage temperature, humidity, and air circulation while dry-aging whole beef carcasses on a commercial scale.
• Butchers Ben and Brent Young of The Meat Hook — who also host Eater’s “Prime Time” — join Leone back at the office to convert a mini-fridge into a DIY dry-aging chamber for subprimal beef cuts.
• The team runs a parallel test dubbed “The Great Pork Experiment,” aging pork alongside the beef for several weeks, all while trying to keep the setup under the radar of building facilities management.

Inside a Commercial Dry-Aging Room

Before Leone tries this at his own desk, he goes to see how the professionals do it. At Prime Food Distributor in Long Island, meat purveyors walk him through the industrial version of dry-aging: whole beef carcasses hung in rooms where temperature, humidity, and airflow are all monitored constantly to prevent spoilage while the meat matures. It’s the same basic chemistry Leone will later attempt in a fraction of the space, just executed with commercial refrigeration and years of institutional know-how behind it.

The stakes on a commercial scale are different — a botched batch means real financial loss, not just a ruined lunch — so the PFD NY segment doubles as a crash course in exactly what can go wrong when airflow or humidity drifts out of range. That context matters once the show shifts back to a mini-fridge in a Manhattan office.

Ben and Brent Young Bring The Meat Hook to the Office

Back at Bon Appétit, Leone teams up with Ben and Brent Young of The Meat Hook, the Brooklyn butcher shop the brothers run and the subjects behind Eater’s “Prime Time” series. The Youngs walk Leone through building a home-scale version of what he just saw on Long Island — a dedicated mini-fridge repurposed purely for aging, with airflow and microbial development tracked over the following weeks.

They age subprimal cuts of beef steak in the makeshift chamber, and layer in the pork side project — “The Great Pork Experiment” — to see whether the same dry-aging logic holds up on a different animal entirely. The whole thing runs for weeks inside the Condé Nast office, which means Leone spends as much time managing the smell and dodging attention from building management as he does managing the science.

The Great Pork Experiment is exactly what it sounds like — a mini-fridge, a hunk of pork, and a few weeks to find out if dry-aging works on something other than beef.

Trimming the Funk and Tasting the Payoff

After weeks of aging, the cuts come out covered in a desiccated, funky outer layer known as the pellicle — the crust that forms as moisture evaporates and enzymes break down the meat’s proteins. Leone and the Young brothers trim that layer away before cooking the beef and pork to see whether the home setup actually delivered the concentrated, beefier flavor and more tender bite that professional dry-aging is known for. If you’re curious about the mechanics of turning raw cuts into a finished plate at home, it’s the same basic instinct behind other kitchen deep-dives in Bon Appétit’s Cooking & Food Experiences coverage — take a technique chefs use professionally and see if it survives being shrunk down to a home kitchen.

The payoff is the whole point of the episode: whether weeks of babysitting a mini-fridge full of raw meat in an office actually produces steak and pork worth eating, or just an elaborate way to annoy coworkers. It’s the same experimental streak that runs through other Bon Appétit test-kitchen stunts, like when the crew let home cooks race against the clock on classic dishes — the fun is in watching a real technique get put through its paces on camera.

Leone never says whether facilities management ever caught on to the mini-fridge sitting in the office for weeks straight — which, for a show built on ambitious kitchen stunts pulled off in a corporate test kitchen, is basically the best ending you could ask for.