Last week, we ran a hint suggesting you could cook a steak better by starting from frozen, since a frozen steak is harder to burn when it hits the pan. I was intrigued enough to give it a try.
Despite what the original post said about starting with a frozen steak fresh from a freezer, the actual source recipe recommends freezing the steak only for an hour, so that’s what I did. A quick sear, an hour in the oven (at a very low temperature) and the steak was done. And it was good — a nice outside, a soft inside, and an abundance of flavour.
But for all that, I’m not sure that it was any better than if I’d cooked the same steak in a frypan, and it certainly wasn’t any quicker. The secret to good steak, I’ve always believed, is to make sure you don’t constantly turn the meat: start on one side, flip when it’s half done, and let it rest a little when you’re finished. If you can’t make that work, the oven-cooking trick is definitely useful, but again I’m not entirely sure how much difference the freezing made. Bottom line? I won’t be doing it again, but it works fine if you want to try it.
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