13 Tips For Cooking Frozen Steak

When it comes to some foods, fresh is always better than frozen, whether in terms of texture or taste (though no one's knocking frozen food as a whole; its affordability and shelf life make it highly attractive to many home cooks). However, don't make the mistake of assuming that fresh steak is always better than frozen.

Frozen steak comes with many benefits. It's always ready to go when you are and doesn't have to be gobbled up within three to five days of purchase. It doesn't even have to be thawed before you cook it. In fact, some even prefer cooking steaks from frozen versus cooking steaks from fresh, as it can be easier to get the desired internal doneness when cooking a frozen steak, without accidentally over- or undercooking the steak. Plus, cooking a frozen steak is just easy — even if you do need the following top tips for cooking frozen steak, for the best results possible.

You pull out a pack of steaks that you've had sitting in the freezer for a bit, and you're getting ready to cook them. You open the pack, take one out, and notice that these aren't the same bright red steaks you purchased. These steaks have turned a kind of pale or even dark brown. Surely you have to toss them in the trash, right?

Not at all. Frozen food often changes color, but the color change doesn't always indicate that something is wrong. Particularly if red meat turns to pale or dark brown, it might just indicate a lack of oxygen in the packaging (as such, this color change is particularly common in vacuum-sealed food). Less commonly, this color change is an indicator of freezer burn or spoilage, but there will be other signs and symptoms if your steak is truly no longer safe to eat. If the brown coloring has a bit of a yellow or green tint, that's a bad sign. If you thaw the frozen steak and find that it has curled edges or a bit of slime, that's also a sign you should toss the steak. Spoiled steak will additionally have a noticeably bad odor.

If you'd prefer to thaw your frozen steaks, then opt to do so in a water bath. Thawing your frozen steaks on the countertop can lead to bacterial growth and food spoilage (and then food-borne illness). Thawing your frozen steaks, particularly if they're thicker cuts, in the fridge can take over a day or even 36 hours. So, put your steak in a sealed, zip-top bag and submerge it in cool water (no warmer than 40 F), either in the kitchen sink or in a bowl. Change out the water periodically, whenever it comes up to room temperature. This process should thaw most steaks in under an hour.

That said, you don't actually have to thaw your frozen steaks at all before cooking them, and you might find that cooking a steak from frozen is easier than cooking a thawed steak. You can take your frozen steak directly from the freezer and straight to the cast iron skillet, oven, or grill. While cooking steaks from frozen takes longer than cooking steaks from fresh, frozen steaks are less likely to overcook and are usually juicier than steaks cooked from fresh.

Certain cuts of steak freeze — and cook straight from frozen — best. If you plan on cooking your frozen steak without thawing, opt for thicker cuts such as ribeye, strip steaks, top sirloin, or filet mignon. These cuts can handle the longer cooking time you'll need to take a steak from frozen solid to your desired doneness. Smaller, thinner cuts won't hold up as well when being cooked straight from frozen, as is the case with skirt steak (the best steak to use for fajitas). However, you will find that these smaller, thinner cuts don't take the super-long thawing time that thick cuts require, so if you prefer to thaw frozen foods in the fridge, you might appreciate this fact.

For just freezing steak in general, the fattier the cut, the better it freezes. Along these lines, look to some of the same thick cuts that you might want to cook straight from the freezer. Ribeye steaks are the fattiest of cuts that are readily available in the grocery store, but other good options include strip steaks, porterhouse steaks, and T-bones.

Have you ever tried to season a frozen piece of meat (or anything frozen)? There's a good chance that your seasoning just bounced right off the frosty exterior. As such, if you're cooking steaks from frozen, wait to add your desired seasonings until the steaks have been cooked enough that they're no longer hard as a rock on the exterior. If you're searing the steaks before putting them into the oven, for example, this would mean seasoning them after searing them but before finishing them off in the oven. Similarly, if you're thawing the steaks, wait until they're actually thawed before sprinkling on your favorite seasoning mixture.

If you're not buying the steaks frozen, but are buying fresh steaks to freeze and use later, you can season the steaks before you freeze them, so that they're already seasoned and ready to go when you cook them in the future. You can also marinate your steak and then freeze it.

There are a few preferred ways to cook steak from frozen. While, yes, you can throw that steak on the grill and you can toss it in your cast iron pan for searing on the stovetop, you'll want to change your cooking methods just slightly, or perhaps choose an alternative cooking method altogether.

Consider searing your steak first, in your cast iron on the stovetop, then pop that pan of steak into the oven for the interior to finish cooking all the way, to your desired doneness. This method works well for thicker cuts of steak and is typically very forgiving. Some prefer to swap things around and do the reverse sear method as well, letting the steaks cook to being very nearly done in the oven before giving them a quick sear on the stovetop. You can also sous vide your steak, if you just want to set it and forget it, without a lot of flipping and maneuvering steaks on your end. After the sous vide process is complete, which can take several hours for frozen steaks, sear the steaks quickly, to get that nice outer char.

When you typically cook a steak, you might use just a small amount of oil. You just want enough to provide a little lubrication. You're not deep-frying the thing, after all. However, if you're cooking a steak straight from the freezer, you might want to be a little more heavy-handed with the oil than usual. In fact, you might want to add so much oil to your pan that the steak doesn't just rest on a glittery sheen of oil that's barely there, but that the steak actually sits in a pool of oil that comes up just a small amount on the sides.

Why so much oil? Think about it. A rock-hard, frozen steak is rigid. A thawed, raw steak is limber. The thawed steak fits itself to the pan and lays completely flat. A frozen steak does not lay completely flat — so if you don't use enough oil, the oil may not touch every part of the frozen steak as it begins cooking, which means the entire steak may not cook evenly and that you may be missing some char in spots.

No matter how you decide to cook your frozen steak, if you're cooking multiple frozen steaks, be careful not to overcrowd your cooking surface. Not only will crowding multiple frozen steaks into a small space keep your cooking surface colder, longer, slowing the cooking process, but it can also disrupt the Maillard reaction, aka the chemical process that's responsible for that tasty sear on your steak's exterior.

The Maillard reaction occurs at temperatures over 280 F. If you're not allowing your pan to reach that temperature, quickly, you could end up with a steak that's overcooked internally before it's seared on the outside. Additionally, as the frozen steak thaws in the pan and releases moisture to a degree, that moisture can further lower the pan's temperature, preventing the Maillard reaction; the more frozen steaks in the pan, the more moisture that's being released. In a standard-sized cast iron skillet, cook only one to two steaks at a time. Ideally, you'll have about an inch of free space surrounding each cooking steak. Any more steaks than one or two and you risk interrupting this delicate process.

No matter what your chosen cooking method, be sure to preheat your cooking surface. Remember, you want to achieve that characteristic steak sear and that can only happen at a high heat. If you add a frozen steak to a cold cooking surface, it's going to take way too long to come to heat and you might not actually reach the 280 F necessary for the Maillard reaction by the time your steak's interior starts to overcook. So, preheat your grill or your pan on the stove and make sure your cooking surface is well-oiled (with additional oil, if needed) before you add your frozen steak.

The only instance where you won't want to heat your cooking surface to high heat before adding your frozen steaks is if you're planning on cooking those steaks in the oven, before searing them. In that case, you'd let the steaks' interiors cook at a low temperature, until done, and then you'd remove the steaks from the oven and sear them in a preheated, high-heat pan on the stovetop.

If you pride yourself on being able to identify when a steak is cooked to your desired doneness on sight, or if you have a knack for knowing just about how much time it'll take for your steak to cook, don't make the mistake of thinking you can rely on those skills when cooking a frozen steak. Because your steaks are swinging from one extreme temperature to another, very quickly, you can't expect the same rules to apply.

Bust out the meat thermometer and track your steak's doneness as you go. Ideally, you'd use a leave-in thermometer on a thick cut of steak, so you can open the oven or glance across the grill to automatically monitor the steak's internal temperature without any additional hassle. However, if you don't own one, a good instant thermometer is fine.

Just as you would when cooking steak normally, you'll want to remove the steaks from your heat source before they've reached the standard temperature for your desired level of doneness, as the carry-over cooking will continue to raise the temperature as the meat rests. For example, while a rare steak has an internal temperature of 120 F to 125 F, you'll want to stop cooking the rare steak at 115 F, and let the carry-over cooking increase the internal temperature by another 5 to 10 degrees as the steak rests.

As you could probably guess, it does take longer to cook a steak from frozen than it does to cook a steak from thawed — but exactly how much longer will this process require? In general, expect it to take your steak about 50% longer than normal to cook to your desired doneness, or about 1.5 times the normal cooking time. This is what the U.S. Department of Agriculture advises for safely cooking frozen meat and poultry, from a frozen state without thawing.

However, what if you're not really sure how long it takes to cook a steak in general, so you can't really multiply that "normal" amount of time by 1.5? For a thawed, fresh steak, while the total amount of time required for cooking will differ depending on how done you like your steak, you can expect the cooking time to take anywhere from 5 minutes for rare to 10 minutes for well-done, if you're using a single, high-heat cooking method. If you're using a two-step approach, searing the steaks before putting them in the oven or vice versa, you can expect cooking a thawed steak to take longer, up to 15 minutes in the oven after or before searing.

If you know you'll be cooking the steaks from frozen and are buying fresh steaks to freeze for later use, take care to freeze the steaks the right way to begin with. Following just a few simple tips can make the cooking-from-frozen process much more successful and easier when the time comes.

For example, make sure the steaks freeze flat. Rather than just tossing raw steaks in a zip-top bag and then tossing that bag in the freezer, take care to lay out your steaks flat on a baking sheet, pre-freezing them that way, and only then wrapping them and placing them in your zip-top bag. Doing so will mean a steak that lays flatter when you put it, frozen, in your pan or on your other cooking surface, so it makes contact with that cooking surface evenly, for an even cook and sear. Pre-freezing the steaks unwrapped first can also reduce condensation, which means your steak loses less moisture and causes less splatter when you do eventually cook it.

Yes, freezing food is an amazing way to hold on to ingredients long-term and, yes, if your food is constantly kept at 0 F or below, it will stay good indefinitely — potentially forever. However, just because you can do something, doesn't always mean that you should. Quality can deteriorate over time, even when a food is frozen, and a steak that you froze last month will look and taste far different than a steak that you froze last year. As such, try not to hold onto your frozen steaks too long. If it's been in the freezer more than a year, maybe skip it.

There are a few signs that your frozen steak is seriously suffering in the quality department. If the steak is surrounded by a lot of frost, is visibly freezer-burnt, has a green hue, or just smells "off," it's better to be safe than sorry you're eating a subpar or even dangerous steak. Likewise, if you've had issues with your freezer or the steak's freezer-safe packaging, opt not to eat the frozen steak, as those issues could have negatively impacted the steak's quality as well.

So you froze some steaks and decided to thaw a few for a barbecue. Your guest list ended up shorter than expected, though, and now you have some thawed steaks leftover. Do you have to cook them even if you're not sure they'll be eaten? Not necessarily. You can safely refreeze the thawed steaks, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service. The only thing you might worry about is a decline in quality, as the thawed steaks will have lost some of their moisture during the thawing process.

If you do opt to cook the thawed steaks, but still don't get around to eating them within three to four days, you can freeze those cooked steaks, as well. You can even thaw those cooked steaks at a later point and then refreeze them again if you don't use them all this time around. You can freeze, thaw, and refreeze food multiple times, safely, so long as you keep the food out of the danger zone where bacteria grows — just note that each time you do so, the quality will continue to decline.