Bulgogi, red beans, pullman bread

Experimental Bulgogi.
Experimental red beans
Experimental Pullman type bread

Red beans soaked overnight. Next day, fried bacon incompletely with finely diced onion and garlic. Refreshed water of beans and added to bacon and onion. Added bay leaf, cumin. But no salt or pepper. Boiled for hours until softened, then added one small tin of roasted chopped tomato and maple syrup.

I'm considering buying a Pullman loaf pan because I want square slices of bread. No dome. But I'm worried. We baker types like our loaves lofty as possible but Pullman pans have a lid that limits their expansion. You have to judge exactly how much your dough will rise. And all that works out to how much water you start out with.

I know my pans fairly well. 1.5 Cups of water produces a nicely risen loaf with a dome above the rim. So I backed off to 1.25 Cups water and that was pretty much perfect.

This is not a pullman pan. I simply tuned it upside down on baking tray but I did not weight it down. I sensed it would lift a little bit and it did. I did not anticipate it would lift the pan at an angle. But the idea is to trim off the crust for elegant sandwiches so that doesn't matter.

This convinced me to buy a pullman pan. I've been putting it off, but now I want to try copying Japanese style sandwiches. 

I want the bread to not have any large holes. This bread has medium size holes. I was aiming for perfectly uniform crumb. That is my goal. Bread that resembes Wonder Bread except a lot better than that.

Bulgogi is a North Korean thing. It is thinly sliced steak grilled or broiled. But first marinated for several hours.

* soy sauce

* half the amount of sugar as soy sauce

* fresh grated ginger

* fresh minced garlic

* toasted sesame seed oil

You'll usually see sesame seeds and/or chopped scallion

This is an excellent meal. The beans are sweet. The beef is richly enhanced with customary familiar Asian flavor ingredients and the bread is excellent.