If you ever had the steak at Waffle House, you already know what a cooked from frozen steak taste like.
I used to buy steaks from a “box” dealer. They were thin, frozen steaks. I would melt a pat of butter in the frying pan, then fry them up. They were delicious, but I wouldn’t serve them for an evening meal.
Same, except that I use a stainless steel pan instead of a cast iron skillet, and it takes a little longer than five minutes to make the sauce (I cover up the steaks and hold them while I’m doing that part, then slice them into strips for serving. My kids sometimes eat a bunch of steak and sometimes turn up their noses, so it’s easier not to serve them whole to cut at the table.) The fond from searing the meat is part of the basis for the pan sauce. I try to do a full mise en place setup before I take the steaks out of the sous vide so I’m not searching for ingredients while I’m holding the edge of the steak against the pan to cook it. (I don’t like the way the steaks look if they don’t have some sear along the edges as well as the flat sides.)
Of course not! What kind of heathen would do that?
I don’t bother with sous vide, but do a similar sort of thing with cooking the steak in the oven at 250F until it hits an internal temp of about 110 (25 minutes or so), let it rest for about five minutes, and then searing it for two minutes a side, and that bring it up to about 125 interior. Similar sort of idea-> slowly and evenly get the steak to temperature, and then sear it for crust and flavor. That way, you have maximum rare-medium rare interior, with just a little band of well done around the seared portion.
Without a sear, my rare steaks look pretty much identical to how they looked when I took them out of the refrigerator, since they are rare all the way through.