The TikTok from @themoniqueelyousfi is captioned with a blunt headline of its own: the New York strip from a warehouse store is “awful,” followed by “Yes, I said it.” It opens with her lifting a thick, dark steak out of a pan with tongs and setting it on a wooden board, as white on screen text reads “NY STRIP STEAK.” “Dinner tonight we have a thick New York strip steak,” she says. “We can’t forget that sizzle, of course.”
Before she cuts, she explains the setup, and the setup is the story. “I was a very good girl and use my temperature probe for the steak,” she says. “Because it is so thick, it’s also frozen before I put it into my toaster oven.” So the steak went from the freezer to the toaster oven without a thaw, and she says she is “really hoping that I got it just right.” The probe read “115 degrees internal,” she says, and she figures that if she lets it rest for ten minutes, “we’re probably going to be at about 120, which is a perfect medium.”
She seasons it with flaky sea salt, adds a small pile on the side to dip into and then, in the video’s most honest moment, loses the patience she was bragging about. “Do you hear that crust?” she asks. “All right, it’s been all of like one minute. Let’s go ahead and cut into it, see if I ruined it or not.” Instead of a ten minute rest, the steak gets about a minute. The frames show the cut halves with a bright pink interior and a dark seared edge, and she says, “It actually looks pretty good.”
Then comes the tasting, and it is where the review turns. She is worried about tenderness and notes that New York strips are “not my favorite,” so she goes for the back end of the steak to judge the meat itself. She says these are her steaks “from that big loin that I bought.” She pauses, chews and delivers the verdict, saying she will never buy a New York strip from the warehouse store again: “It’s just not that good. The quality of the meat is super tough, super chewy.” Her last line is a shrug. “It’s just not for me. Meat is meat, and a girl must eat.” She says she will finish this one tonight.
It is worth keeping her own caveats in view. In the video she says that this is “what happens when you try to cook a completely frozen steak and have zero patience or time to make it perfect,” so the result reflects a method as well as a cut. The review also rests on a single steak.
The method does raise a safety question, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service answers it on its beef page. It says it is safe to cook frozen beef in the oven, on the stove or on the grill without defrosting it first, though cooking time may be about 50 percent longer. The same page sets a minimum internal temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit for steaks, checked with a food thermometer, followed by a rest of at least three minutes, and says cooking to a higher temperature is acceptable. The 115 degree reading she mentions sits below that figure, and she cut the steak after roughly a minute of rest.
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