Dry Ager Review and Test by Marcos Campos from Porto Chicago Video

I started working in the kitchen when I was 15 years old. After culinary school, I started working in different kitchens in Valencia and Madrid until I ended up being a chef de cuisine when I was 18 years old.

Porto is the newest restaurant in the group. It's going to be a Galician and Portuguese restaurant focused on a lot of seafood and steaks. Dry Ager was perfect for us, especially because normally it is used for meat, beef, and pork, but in our case at Porto, we dry age seafood and fish that we bring directly from Galicia, Spain.

The whole idea of Porto started a couple of years ago when I went to Galicia. I mean, I fell in love with Galicia, and I was telling Danny we have to open a place like this. We've got to bring these flavors to Chicago and to American people. I think the whole idea started from there, to be able to bring the fish and the seafood to Porto.

It's beautiful to see how a hake or a turbot reacts in a Dry Ager. It's very nice. I mean, especially when working with fish and dry aging fish, it's really, really important how clean those machines are. And also, the wasting. Like, I would say the weight of the fish, you will get more weight and yield from a fish than you would get with any other dry aging system because the water content is slowly aging instead of a faster process.

The food at Porto is everything is done over charcoal and wood, kind of like the old style. I like to call it grandma style. You know, when my great grandmother didn't have gas in the kitchen they were cooking everything over fire and the flavor was so much better. I wanted to replicate that idea at Porto.

Dry Ager is super easy to start because it doesn't have any water connections, it doesn't need any water drain. You can put it in any part of the restaurant you want it and it will look really fine. Also, it is really important for us at Porto because it's beautiful and the rest of the restaurant having a piece like this that showcases what we do, and people are able to see the product inside, and what we do, and how we work, and the story behind it. Dry Ager is pushing ourselves more and more because people are able to see the quality of the products.