I’ve read Meat (by Pat LaFrieda) and watched Thomas Keller (e.g. Masterclass episode) address this topic from two different, conflicting perspectives.
Pat says no, barring frozen meat, tempering meat to somewhere around room temp is both unnecessary and unsanitary.
However, Keller describes doing so as imperative.
Both of these individuals are very accomplished (one perhaps more-so than the other), so I’m unsure what to think here: is tempering meat good or bad?
Decades ago, the advice was always to let it come up to room temperature, but more recent advice is typically to not worry about that step.
It’s easier to achieve medium rare on a piece of beef while still developing a good crust on the meat if the center is cold when you start cooking it.
For stuff that needs to be cooked through, like poultry, it’s going to cook more quickly if it’s not cold in the center, but the total time (sitting on the counter, plus time on the stove or oven) is longer and there’s a higher risk of cross contamination. (Meat juices dripping on the counter, etc). You can cook at a slightly lower heat for more time, and achieve the same results, but this might not be acceptable in a restaurant where a relatively small delay might adversely affect the whole night when you compound the effects of a 2 minute delay for every time it’s cooked through the night if they’re at capacity.
Giving the meat a chance to warm slightly also gives you a chance to season it before you cook it. Again, some people are for and against this aspect, too. (Salting too early can draw out moisture, and flavors don’t really penetrate meat as quickly as we thought it does, so it’s still going to be right at the surface)
Changing from one method to the other does require adjusting your cooking time and temperature slightly, so it might require a little bit of adjustment by a cook to get fully dialed in to the alternate method, so I can understand a reluctance to change how they do things, especially if it would risk serving their patrons food that might get sent back because it wasn’t to their desired fineness.
When you get a cookbook, it’s basically documenting how they cook something. It will tell you how they find it’s best to cook something, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve exhaustively tried everything possible. And they might have different considerations in evaluating their ideal technique than your situation.
It’s also worth noting that although your chef who recommended only worrying about it when it’s frozen might be wrong on that for steaks. America’s Test Kitchen tested cooking from frozen, and although they said it wasn’t as good as a never frozen steak, they preferred it to a frozen then thawed steak. But they were also aiming for medium rare, so it’s possible that well done might be trickier from frozen.
If you have the opportunity, I’d recommend doing a test yourself, and see what works well for you, in your kitchen, with your pans and stove. (And it might be seasonal, as my kitchen is a different temperature in the summer vs the winter)
