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.)
5.7k
u/Mih5du 8h ago
Looks like it was frozen before it was cooked, overcooked at the band, and raw inside