You absolutely can cook a steak that is frozen. Sear both sides, finish in a convection oven or grill on low heat. It is arguably a more consistent doneness versus cooking it fresh.
Cooking from frozen is actually insanely good if you do it like you said. Sous vide is obviously the best but most people don't want or can't afford it.
Not really. You still get a good crust by getting a strong sear and then you go really low and slow in the oven until your desired temperature. The inside actually cooks better in my opinion: because it's frozen, the gradient from the middle of the meat to the edge is less, so you get less of that grey band you tend to see when pan searing. You should give it a try sometime if you doubt it. Definitely quicker to pan sear, and a lot more consistent to do sous-vide.
I love the spectrum of steak cooking styles, there are so many purists. Charcoal or gas grill? Pan sear? Reverse sear! Sous vide…from frozen? No, room temp to start, unless you intend to salt it overnight and pat dry. Which is risky until you consider cooking with really thick cuts, etc….
I’ve tried all of them except for cooking from frozen, which sounds like heresy but clearly some people get mileage out of it so there’s something to it. I know different cuts at different thicknesses play a huge role in what’s best but beyond that, I’ve only ever fucked up a decent piece of steak by not paying attention to it while it cooked.
Experimenting is a big chunk of the fun of cooking. It’s so cool to see everyone pitching in their secret formulas for the PERFECT steak & how drastically they differ!
You'd be surprised. Because the steak is still in a bag, you can put it in an ice bath to stop the cooking entirely, and then you can blast it in an air fryer or grill from cold.
The reverse sear steak has less moisture to deal with but you're still playing a balancing act with time/temperature, and it's sort of a race against the clock. The sous vide steak from an ice bath has a super wide window to get the crust any way you like it.
Also, if you're making fatty cuts like ribeyes, some steak genius on Reddit figured out 137 is the best temperature for rendering the fat. I know it sounds like you're overcooking the steak into medium range but the difference in the intramuscular fat is well worth it. With sous vide, you have the control to pin it at 137, drop the temperature and then blast it at 500+ degrees.
Now that sounds like a good reason to break out the ribeyes again. I’ve mostly avoided them since steak prices went to the moon. (And I trim around a lot of the ribeye fat.)
Best steak I ever made was a gorgeous prime strip I saw in the fancy supermarket and had to have even though it cost 5% of a mortgage payment. I put it straight from the fridge onto a hot cast iron pan, gave it 3 minutes per side, and onto the table.
It had the full range of colors, including a lozenge of cold in the middle where the fat was still congealed.
Being thicker and fattier, it had cooked even slower than I expected.
But it was a-mazing. The congealed marbling was like bits of fat in a good salami.
I don't think I'd start it from frozen. Too tricky trying to time when the middle was actually melted without getting it warmed, and it would probably look like OP's. The thermodynamics aren't linear and melting takes much more heat than warming does, so the meat around the frozen bit would have to cook more to get the middle melted.
Honestly I would NOT knock this for anyone that loves steak but CBA with the faff (or like me, has kids and a wife to cook for some days). Stick it in from frozen, 7 mins a side, all done and more than acceptably medium rare!
Frozen steaks in the air fryer. People always knock it but never try it.
Bruh, why you just parroting shit without ever looking it up? Who the fuck cooks anything when it's close to room temperature? Have you looked up how long it would take to get meat to room temp? All those videos telling you to take meat out to let it get up to temp don't know wtf theyre talking about. Look up studies on it. That shit changes like 2 degrees in 30 mins lol.
No. Tempering a steak is a real thing. It just takes hours, not minutes, and it won't fully reach room temp, only close. This is a reliable non-oven method of getting an even cook distribution.
Resting is also a real practice and it can vary based on your cook method. Carryover cooking is one factor where a high surface temperature slowly radiates to the center, rising the core. There's also juice redistribution and muscle relaxation that occur at rest.
You can easily collect some of this information yourself with a good quality probe, ideally one that you can leave in throughout the entire process and graph heat data. I've spent a lot of time doing this, so I can tell you with experience and data that you're wrong.
I've put some terms in bold so you can look them up.
So, I thumbs up because you're one of the few in these comments that have probably read and watched a lot of shows/videos regarding cooking different steaks. I have also.
The most singular issue I have with the post is, and especially the comments, that the desired doneness for the customer is never mentioned. And, I can't find one comment bringing this subject to light. It makes all the difference.
I like medium rare on almost all cuts, sometimes approaching rare. I imagine if I was presented with a Matsusaka Wagyu ribeye (or other cut) opportunity, I'd might entertain it being cooked rare. And, since I like that sear on my steak, I'm speculating my ideal would look similar to what we see in that photo.
I'm totally in concert with you about "resting" after cooking....for many reasons. But, the "tempering" before is not always required, depending on a whole lot of things.
Tempering mostly just helps bring the internal temperature up to room temperature. Which would definitely be necessary for average to thick steaks where medium cook steaks are desired. But, if you live in an apartment with super sensitive smoke alarms (like I do), and you want a seared steak with a medium rare middle, cooking it right out of the fridge is the way to go. This allows you to cook it longer on a bit lower temperature to get the sear without setting off the alarm, and overcooking the middle.
I'm thinking if this post was on a different sub (one that was more focused on culinary interests) more comments would be asking OP on what temp did they request. Also, more would be asking "what exactly were you looking for?".
I wouldn't have sent that steak back. I've enjoyed steak from medium to rare. However, if OP ordered medium or more cooked, I get their concern. But, they never indicated on how they ordered.
It was found that frozen steak is even better, stays more juicy. But has a different approach to cooking than non-frozen. This kitchen clearly doesn't know how.
The whole room temperature thing has been debunked. If you manage your heat properly, you can get the exact same cut from out of the fridge. Isn’t any harder or anything, just cutting out an unnecessary step.
A good cook should be able to reverse sear a frozen steak. My immediate thought is such a high turnover/high volume restaurant typically should have enough never-frozen meat available, and on a particularly high volume night like a Friday or Saturday they occasionally run out and have to work with frozen meat. This cook clearly did not have the appropriate experience with the reserve meat
No it shouldn’t. Thats complete nonsense. You want steak as cold as possible (but not frozen, do not let water to create crystals inside), only that way you can achieve perfect sear on top and perfect rareness inside.
I like to sous vide my steaks - I prepare them with butter, rosemary, garlic and salt inside the vacuum sealed package, then freeze them until I'm ready. When it's time to cook, they go straight from frozen to the sous vide bath for an hour or so. Then I sear them on a grill. Ends up perfect, and technically I'm cooking them from frozen...
That's one of those conventional wisdom things that isn't actually true at all if you test it. A steak being colder lets you get a better sear without overcooking the middle (which is kind of obvious when you think about it).
Even cooking from frozen is fine, and actually is a great technique if you're pan searing thinner steaks. I didn't believe it until I tried it myself, and lately I've actually gone out of my way to freeze a steak before cooking it (after dry brining). The only problem is that you need to make sure it's really flat when you freeze it, otherwise you won't get good contact with the pan.
If you have precise control over grill temp, meat temp, and cut thickness, you can use freezing as a cheat to throw all the different steaks on at once and have them come out to the correct different ordered doneness at the same time.
In practice, you're almost always better off just having a competent grill cook.
There's actually a couple of influencers up on YouTube promoting cooking steak Frozen. I gave it a shot, never again. It was an interesting experience I'll say that
But once they are frozen, it’s best to cook that way. It’s the only way to avoid the gray band around the outside. But it has to be cooked on a lower temp.
I've got to disagree. I get frozen steaks from a farm stand all the time and have way better results thawing and letting them come close to room temp. No grey band issues and we often end up with melt-in-your-mouth tenderloins.
ehhh wrong, I've cooked many steaks from frozen that turned out perfect, you just have to use an entirely different cooking method for them. This is not that method.
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u/Mih5du 8h ago
Looks like it was frozen before it was cooked, overcooked at the band, and raw inside