TBF (First Time Baker)

Hi folks, 

I baked my first batch of bread today---following Michael Pollan's recipe out of Cooked, a modified Tartine loaf---and it was quite the failure. 

I'll give as much info as possible here to see if anyone can help me out. 

Recipe (very slightly modified from Pollan's): 

Starter: 50g white flour, 50g wheat flour, 100g warm water, 20% previous day's starter. 

Leaven: 100g wheat flour, 100g white flour, 200g water, 35 g starter

Bread: 600g wheat flour, 400g white flour, 900g water, 25g salt

***

Starter: My starter is doing great. Nice and bubbly a while after every feeding. Smells fruity and pleasant. 

Leaven: The leaven for this loaf didn't rise very much. Maybe about half what I was expecting. It did, however, float when dropped in some warm water. I figured that was a good sign. 

Bread: I pre-soaked the flour the night before while the leaven was rising. The following morning I added my leaven to the soaked flour. Note: Pollan's recipe calls for *half* the leaven; I added the whole thing, assuming it wouldn't matter. (I told you, this is my first time.)

Every hour for the next four hours, during the bulk fermentation period, I'd fold the dough over itself by way of quarter-turns of the bowl. At the end of bulk fermentation, the dough smelled rather bland---not "yeasty and slightly sour," as Pollan's recipe advises it should. 

After bulk fermentation I divided the dough up, shaped it into two globes, and left it to rest for twenty minutes. Then I flipped the globes over and shaped them into the "rough rectangle of dough" the recipe advises. After this I dropped them into their proofing bowls (two glass mixing bowls, on the smaller side), and let them proof for around three hours on a warm windowsil. They didn't seem to rise all that much, though they definitely rose some.

Near the end of proofing, my mother-in-law smelled the dough and said it had a distinctly "Elmer's glue" smell to it. I sniffed; darn it, she was right. Not gross but not pleasant at all, either.

At the end of the proofing period, I put the dough into two cast-iron enamel-coated casserole dishes preheated in a 500 degree oven. I didn't have a razor blade or lame handy, so I tried to score the loaf with a sharpened kitchen knife; no good! There was nothing I could do so I just put the loaves into the oven with the pots covered and put the temp down to 450. 

After twenty minutes I uncovered the pots and put them back in for another twenty. I did not observe much rise at this point. (I swiped a knife across the tops of the loaves in a belated attempt at scoring.) At the end of the next twenty minutes I took them out. There was no pleasant bread smell; they didn't really smell like *anything.* The loaves themselves looked goofy and ugly. 

I attempted to remove them from the pots. Well, they were stuck in there, but good. I eventually managed to scrape them out. More or less the entire bottom part of the loaf was left stuck to the pots. 

The loaves themselves didn't actually taste *that* bad. Kind of like a slightly higher-quality cracker. Much of it was undercooked. Radically unsatisfying, given what I knew they could of been. The loaves will go to the chickens, of course. 

Please see photos for reference. 

Any help / advice would be greatly appreciated!