Pain

My first foray into breadmaking has gotten off to an inauspicious start. Mark Bittman cautioned that the dough may "look like a mess" upon transfer into the cast iron pot (and blithely followed with "but that is O.K."), but he never said anything about my smoke alarm shrieking. Not to mention, not all the dough made it in a single transfer, so I nervously wait these next 30 minutes to see if my loaf will emerge with a tumor.