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.

Absolutely amazing. I'm writing this while waiting for my second batch to ferment. They came out so incredibly well that I couldn't stop thinking about them all day.

Another recipe from the lovely Dutch Oven Madness. I saw she was interviewed for a podcast by another blogger, I'll have to check that out later.