This one's for all you steak lovers out there. I now know pretty much every cut of steak there is (or at least ones that are sold in restaurants), as well as where on the cow they came from. Now, I love a yummy NY strip, medium-rare, with a cracked peppercorn crust as much as the next guy, but there were some interesting things I learned about steaks. 
The most surprising to me was the aging process all of our meats undergo before they ever reach your plate. There are two aging processes a cut of steak can go through; wet aging & dry aging. Wet aging is simply when the meat is sealed in a bag in its own juices, and is tenderized through that process. Most wet meat is aged for about 2 weeks. Dry aging, get ready for this, is when a large cut is simply set on a sheet pan in a moist cool storage room or refrigerator and rotated and pated every few days. It is usually aged this way 30 days or more! As you can see in this photo the meat will have a rind where all of the connective tissue juices (the things that make meat tough) seep out and dry on the surface:
Just below the rind of dried fat and juices is red, tender, delicious steak! The butcher or chef will simply cut away the rind to reveal the fruits of the aging process. Most fine dining restaurants either age their meat like this, or purchase meat that was aged in a similar fashion.
Here chef Almir is holding up an
aged rib eye:
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