I learned about the purpose of salt in bread: it reduces the activity of yeast. I was wondering how this works into the big picture of bread so I did a batch of pretzels with no salt in the initial mix. The dough puffed up quite a bit (as expected) and doubled in size in about an hour. The resulting pretzels still had a tasty crumb whose consistency was fine (small bubbles, fluffy, bordering on dense, very tasty) but they smelled very strongly of yeast. The takeaway here is salt is the counter to yeasty smelling bread. Tomorrow I'm going to take a stab at some real bread.