Dry-Aged Ribeye with Garlic Butter
Six ingredients, three of which are the butter. The table below shows what combines when. The only timing that matters is when you take the steak off.
A dry-aged ribeye has already had weeks of work done to it. The job in the kitchen is to not undo that. Here is the whole thing as one table.
| 2 steaks, 12 oz each Signature Huston Ribeye | 1 salt both sides | 2 rest uncovered, 40 min | 3 sear 2 min a side |
| 2 tsp coarse salt | |||
| 1 Tbsp beef tallow | |||
| 4 Tbsp butter, softened | 4 mash together | 5 roll into a log, chill | |
| 2 cloves garlic, minced | |||
| 1 tsp fresh thyme leaves | |||
| 6Spoon the garlic butter over the hot steaks and let it melt into them. | |||
| 7Rest 8 minutes, then slice across the grain. | |||
Numbers show the order to work in. Each cell spans exactly the ingredients it uses.
The only number worth arguing about
Pull the steaks about five degrees below the doneness you want, because they keep cooking off the heat. The ranges are in our temperature chart, and the agency guidance is linked at the foot of this page.
“And it takes three years to make a steak.”
Gray Shipley
Which is a long time to wait for something you can overcook in ninety seconds. That is the whole argument for a thermometer.
Why salt it forty minutes early
Salt pulls moisture to the surface and then the surface dries. A dry surface browns. A wet one steams first and browns second, which is where most disappointing crusts come from. Our guide to getting a great crust covers the mechanism.
“We used to just kind of not try to outsmart God, let the animal do what it's supposed to do and stay out of the way.”
Gray Shipley
If it still comes out tough
It is almost always the slicing or the resting rather than the beef. Why is my steak tough works through the four causes in order.
“There's two kinds of chefs. There's the chef that is really skilled and really talented and they could tell you about it and, you know, they may go on a TV show and show off about their ability to, you know, pick food out of the trash or take a bag of Doritos and turn it into something gourmet. And they view their exceptional talent as the main contributor to the end product.”
Gray Shipley
Thick enough to give you room for error, marbled enough to forgive a minute.
View Product- Cook to a Safe Minimum Internal Temperature, FoodSafety.gov
- Food Thermometers, USDA FSIS
Food-safety temperatures and storage times on this page are cited to the agencies above rather than to us.
Written at Shipley Farms in Vilas, North Carolina: a family cattle farm raising and dry-aging beef in the Appalachian Mountains, now in its fifth generation. No shortcuts since 1872.
Every quote on this page is Gray Shipley talking, the man who runs this farm. We sat down with him, turned on a recorder, and kept his own words. Hesitations are trimmed so they read on the page. Nothing else is added or reworded, except where Gray revised his own words in review.
Nobody knows this beef better than we do. On food safety we leave it to USDA FSIS and FoodSafety.gov, and we have linked their pages above. Reviewed 3 October 2026.
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