The Clever Freezer Hack For Ready-To-Cook Steak In A Flash

Cooking steak is as much an art as it is a science. And while not every steakhouse secret will be applicable in your everyday life (you're probably not going to be using USDA prime cuts exclusively, for example), a lot of them are tricks you can use at home. You can rest steak from an elevated position, you can use the clock hack to get perfect grill marks, and you can even substitute some steak cuts for others, as long as you know what you're doing. But there's another simple, effective hack you can make use of that you probably aren't doing: freezing meat in its marinade. 

That's right: You can freeze steak in its marinade to save significant amounts of time. No longer do you need to worry about spending hours thawing steak, then just as long soaking it in delicious steak juice — you can do both at once.

The problem with thawing food — and meat in particular — is you shouldn't do it quickly. Sure, you could put a steak in a microwave's defrost cycle, but the texture is likely to be ruined. This has to do with ice crystal formation. 

When you freeze a food, the water in that food freezes, forming ice crystals that can damage the food's cell walls, ruining its texture. You want to freeze meat (and everything else) as fast as possible so that only smaller crystals have a chance to form. Thawing turns this process on its head; you want those crystals to dissolve slowly, because rapid thawing also damages the meat's cell walls.

You have to take time with thawing. And because marinating takes hours, you're due for a slow, slow process. But if you freeze the meat in the marinade in a Ziploc bag, it skips that part of the process and saves you time. You still want to thaw it slowly, but the excess liquid in the marinade isn't a problem here (as long as there's space in the bag). It's not within the meat itself, which is where slow-freezing disruption is a problem.

Marinating has all sorts of little tricks you can make use of when it comes to cooking steak. One of the most interesting is the reverse-marinade, where you cook the meat and then marinate it afterwards.

When you expose steak to high heat, its muscle fibers tighten, expelling liquid towards the edges of the meat. As it cools afterwards, the fibers loosen and create a suction effect, reabsorbing the liquid. (This is the whole reason resting it is so important.) If you marinate steak after you grill it, not only do you dodge the issue of the liquid making it harder to sear the steak, but that reabsorption also works for you. It brings as much of the marinade flavor into the meat as possible.

Whether you make use of this trick or the frozen marinade hack, the important thing is to do it the right way. As long as you follow the rules, your steak experience will go off great.