after dinner sneeze

t says:  I love me a good steak at home, and have clung for a long time to the conventional wisdom that should I have had to freeze a steak, then I should thaw it before cooking.  Cooks Illustrated suggests otherwise:

Now, I think that the idea makes sense.  However, it’s really unclear what the starting point is of the “thawed” steak.  For instance, just because they thawed the steak overnight does not mean that it was tempered appropriately (i.e. taken all the way to room temp) before cooking, which is what I do for all steaks, be it fresh or frozen.  Maybe CI would argue that the “gray band” would have been even larger?  But I think another point of discrepancy is that most people preparing properly tempered steaks don’t drop it in a puddle of standing oil, rather super-hot skillet with just a thin coating of oil at best.  So now I guess that I wish that CI would have tested a few more conditions before changing my steak-making practice altogether … but at least now I know what to do if I forgot to pull a steak out of the fridge the night before.