I portion ribeyes at about 1.5 inches, seal them, and freeze them flat. I would like to drop one in the water at 6pm with no thawing step. Everything I read says add some time, which is not a number. Does anyone have a rule they actually trust at 129F for that thickness, and does the texture come out different from thawed?
Frozen straight in is the single best argument for owning a circulator. Add an hour for a steak that size, and stop thinking about it. Sear from properly dry and nobody will ever know it was frozen.
Ran a side by side over a few weeks because I was curious: same batch, half thawed overnight in the fridge, half from frozen with extra time. Eating quality was indistinguishable to me and to two other people. The only real difference was surface moisture - the frozen ones released a bit more liquid into the bag, so they needed longer patting dry before the pan or the crust suffered.
I got confident and did this with a 2 inch sirloin roast, added an hour, and served something with a distinctly cooler band through the middle. My mistake was applying a steak rule to a much thicker piece of meat. Now anything over about 1.75 inches goes in with the whole time recalculated rather than a bonus hour bolted on.
That is the trap. The extra time for frozen is roughly proportional, not a fixed hour, so it scales with the piece rather than with your patience.
Slight reframe of the whole thread: time to reach core temperature scales with roughly the square of thickness, not with weight and not with whether it started frozen. Frozen shifts the starting point, thickness sets the shape of the curve, which is why a rule that works at 1.5 inches falls apart at 2.5. Measure thickness with calipers once and you will stop guessing forever.
@braise_brenda · 2mo ago · 2 replies
I add half again on top of my thawed time and I have never had a cold centre. For a 1.5 inch steak that means I plan two hours instead of the ninety minutes I would do thawed, and I have checked with a needle probe through foam tape often enough to trust it. Longer is nearly free at 129F, short is not, so if you are guessing then guess high.
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@cast_iron_carl · 2mo ago
Half again matches mine. The one thing I would add is that it only holds if you froze them flat - a steak frozen in a curled lump is effectively thicker than it measures and that is where people get a cool middle.
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