Nearly every cuisine wraps something in wheat dough: dumplings, pies, buns, pastries, sandwiches. The fillings get the attention, but the wrapper is where the real variety is. Each point below is one dish, placed by the recipe for its outer layer: how wet the dough is, how much fat, yeast, sugar and egg it carries. Pick any three for the axes. Drag to rotate, scroll to zoom, click a point for details and the source recipe.
All five are baker's percentages: grams per 100 g of wheat flour, white or wholemeal. Wrappers made from corn, rice, tapioca or rye are left out here; they behave differently enough to deserve their own chart.
Hydration is all the liquid in the dough: water, broth, milk, and the water carried by eggs and butter. Stiff samosa and pie doughs sit around 30–40%. Dumpling doughs mostly 45–65%, bread doughs 55–75%. Coxinha dough (flour cooked in stock) and the batter used for warqa and brik sheets go well past 100%.
Fat is the butter, lard, suet, oil or ghee worked into or laminated through the dough. Lean breads and dumplings sit near zero. Shortcrusts are around 40–65%, and the rough puff for a sausage roll passes 90%. Fat brushed between filo sheets after rolling is not counted.
Yeast is given as instant-yeast equivalent. Chemically leavened doughs (baking powder or soda), steam-lifted laminated pastries and unleavened doughs all sit at zero; colour by Leavening to tell them apart.
Sugar counts every sugar in the dough, including honey and syrup: near zero for most savoury wrappers, high for sweet buns and Cantonese mooncake skin. Egg is the weight of whole egg (or its yolk and white equivalent) per 100 g of flour. It is what sets fresh pasta and enriched breads apart from flour-and-water dumplings.
A little jitter is added in 3D so dishes with identical recipes don't hide each other. The table shows the exact values.
Colour by Cluster to group the dishes with k-means. It uses all five measures, each scaled to its maximum so none dominates, and ignores region, cooking method and filling. The groups below are for six clusters; hierarchical clustering finds nearly the same ones.
Pies and quiche do end up together. The short-and-flaky cluster holds Quiche Lorraine, Cornish pasty, Pork pie, Tourtière, Australian meat pie and Apple pie. It also holds pastries that travelled with empire and trade: Jamaican patty, Nigerian meat pie and the Filipino empanada. Less expected are China's water-oil flaky pastry (Suzhou mooncake, Wife cake), the Malaysian Curry puff, and, at most values of k, India's Samosa and Gujiya. Rubbing ghee into the flour for a samosa (moyan) does the same job as rubbing butter in for shortcrust.
Steamed and baked buns are the same dough. Chinese and Japanese buns (Char siu bao, Nikuman, Siopao) cluster with the Hamburger bun, Kolache (klobasnek), Bierock / Runza and Piroshki. Steaming versus baking changes the crust, not the recipe. Bánh mì, the Mexican Torta and the Cubano sit here too: three sandwich rolls each often traced back to French bread.
Dumplings look alike across Eurasia. The largest group is the lean doughs, little more than flour and water. Jiaozi, Pelmeni, Khinkali, Mantı, Momo, Buuz and Pierogi are close to interchangeable on these numbers, which fits the story of the dumpling spreading along the Silk Road. The baguette in a Jambon-beurre and Naples' Calzone land here too. Long, slow fermentation needs so little yeast that compositionally they are lean doughs that happen to rise.
Egg makes pasta. Ravioli and Tortellini group with Turkey's Su böreği, whose sheets are an egg dough boiled like pasta before layering.
Two small outlier groups. Cantonese mooncake, Bánh bao and the Bolivian Salteña stand apart on sugar. Pastilla, Brik and Coxinha stand apart on liquid: the first two use sheets made from a dabbed batter, and coxinha dough is flour cooked in stock.
Pain au chocolat is laminated like puff pastry and yeasted like a bun, so it switches clusters as k changes; samosa and gujiya sit on the edge between pastry and lean dough the same way. With one recipe per dish, read the boundaries loosely: the dishes near a cluster's edge could fall either way with a different cook's recipe.
Each dish's numbers are computed from one published recipe for its dough, linked in the detail panel and the table. That recipe stands in for the dish, but cooks disagree: a Shanghainese grandmother's xiaolongbao and a restaurant's can differ by 20 points of hydration. Where a recipe gave cups and spoons, they were converted to grams with standard densities. Four dishes (siopao, Filipino empanada, mkate wa mayai, Jamaican patty) have no source with quantities yet, and their values are estimates.
The quantities were read from search-engine extracts of each cited page rather than from the page itself. Each recipe's notes say what was converted or assumed, and anything marked low confidence deserves a second look.