Unfreezing and cooking steaks like ribeye or club steaks

Question

We usually buy club steaks or rib eye steaks and freeze them for cooking them at a later day.

Then a few days later we take the steaks out of the freezer to make them on a pan or in the oven.

One of the issues we have found is that the steaks seem to be a little chewy, meaning that the meat seems to get cut in pieces like if it was rubber, instead of the cut that it has when it is fresh from the day.

Would anyone have an advise for the unfreezing and cooking of steaks so they taste almost like fresh?

Answer 1

To get something as close as possible to fresh meat, you should freeze the meat as quickly as possible:

1. Package the steaks into portions with a high surface area.
2. Chill them well before you freeze.
3. Make sure your freezer is set as low as it will go
4. Freeze them in a single layer.

You can use some other tricks, such as having a thermal sink ... place some metal sheet pans into the freezer while you're chilling down the steaks, then place the steaks between then when they're freezing.

...

But all of that being said ... the chewiness problems are likely some other problem, such as incorrect butchering (ie, cutting with the grain instead of across, not trimming off the silver skin) .

Also, as you're only keeping it for a 'few days', and that means less than 5, you might be better off just chilling them rather than freezing.