I received a flyer this morning from one of the restaurants in our community advertising a beef sale. Before the virus shut it down, this restaurant served prime rib as a Thursday night special, I suspect that this meat was purchased for that event. I opted for the whole ribeye, it turned out to be 18 lbs., boneless and well trimmed. The pack date is 3/4/20, is it normal for restaurants to serve six week aged meat? A party is out of the question so any suggestions as to what I should do with this monster?  Sold out flyer was waiting when I got home.

Wow!  $4/#

Slice it up into steaks, vac seal and freeze after you eat what you can

Oh you lucky guy!!!!!

What a deal. A lot of good meals there for that price.

I don't want to make you feel bad or anything, we have the people set up selling 8 ribeyes for $20 out of the back of a truck in the one parking lot. They have free  chicken and pork chops also on some of the signs.   

A 35 day Wet Age sounds just about right.  Had a steak off one last night, was very good.  Kristin even enjoyed half of what I could not eat.  i knew it had to be good, as it had enough salt on it for a weeks intake for her and she still ate it!

Yeah, freeze.  At those prices I would even consider grinding.  Man would those be good cheeseburgers, tacos, burritos and Shepard's Pie!

Good to know that six weeks of wet aging is acceptable. I was thinking that I want to do traditional prime rib rather than steaks. What if I seasoned it whole, cooked it slowly to an IT for 135°, sliced it into normal prime rib servings, freeze in one or two person quantities, then vacuum pack. If it will fit in my 11 1/2" bags, maybe even sous vide it in my franken cooler after a brief smoke.

A good plan too.  As they could then be sous vide for reheating with no IT degradation. 

At that price I would also have to go down the Cheese Steak, Italian Beef & Roast Beef Caravan sandwich road...

Well I just got finished trimming and boy did I learn a lot about the structure of a ribeye roast. First of all, don't go crazy with a sharp knife the way I did. My once 18 lb. ribeye roast is now a 7 lb. center cut ribeye roast, 3 lbs. of very lean beef stew meat and 10 lbs. of meaty scraps. I'll proceed with the roast as described above, freeze the stew meat for later and boil the scraps to make a gallon of very rich beef stock. The smoker is getting hot as I type. 

Look anything like this as you were taking it apart Dr Frankenstein?  Are you using the rib cap for the stew meat?  So you are left with the eye of the rib-eye, arguably the best cut of beef out there!

Yep, that's exactly what I did. I have not decided whether to cut it in half for convenience before sous vide, cool and freeze or sous vide, remove from the bag, cool, sear, slice and then freeze. As you can probably tell I'm making this up on the fly. 

I decided to go with the latter of the two options. Smoked to an IT of 123° (at small end), sous vide at 132°  for 4 hours and seared. It made nine 8 oz. servings.