I know every now and then you’re in the mood for steak and you just didn’t manage to take it out of the freezer that morning. We get it, it happens all the time.
What you might not know is that thawing your steak prior to cooking is actually optional.
Cooking with fresh beef will always be the ultimate way to prepare a steak, but it turns out that using a frozen steak is your next-best option.
That’s according to Dan Souza, a Cook’s Illustrated senior editor. He experimented in America’s Test Kitchen with eight-strip loin steaks cut in half. He froze the steaks, then thawed half of each steak in the fridge overnight, keeping the other side frozen.
It made sense: The superchilled interior of the frozen steak was more resistant to overcooking, so once seared on the stovetop and then finished in the oven, the meat cooked up juicy and rosy from edge to edge.
Dan figured out how to cook a frozen steak inside, but his colleague Andrea Geary wondered if she couldn’t achieve the same impressive results on the grill. If successful, grillers everywhere could have spur-of-the-moment steak whenever they wanted.
Dan seared both halves of the steak in a hot pan. He seared each side for about ninety seconds before popping both into an oven that he had set at 275 degrees Fahrenheit. He waited for the steaks to both reach an internal temperature of 125.5 degrees, which is ideal for a medium-rare steak.
He weighed both slices of steak before and after cooking. Not only did those vary depending on whether it was frozen or not, but the steak was clearly better when cooked directly from the freezer.
The frozen steaks also browned nearly as fast as the thawed steaks in the skillet, though they did take 18 to 20 minutes of cooking time in the oven (compared with 10 to 15 for the thawed steaks).
Of course, to get these results, the steaks need to be frozen properly. Simply storing them in a bag can cause ice or moisture to form on the steak, which can in turn cause flare-ups when you’re searing the steak in oil.
Instead, Dan said the best way to freeze the steaks was to set them on a baking sheet lined with parchment. Once they’re fully frozen, wrap each steak in plastic wrap and put them into a plastic bag.
Watch the video below to see how frozen steak trumps thawed steak.
Source: AWM
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