Shaped unleavened doughs

(and their derivatives)

Foods, Culinary bases, Flour-based foods

Availability: Earth

Introduction

Unleavened shaping doughs are culinary preparations made from flours mixed with water and sometimes additional ingredients like eggs, salt, or fats like oil or butter, but without any leavening agents. The dough is shaped manually or mechanically into defined forms—such as strands, sheets, balls, discs, or thin wrappers—and then cooked using moist or dry heat, through methods like boiling, steaming, baking, or frying.

Description of shaped unleavened doughs

From a technical perspective, these doughs do not undergo fermentation or whipping, but rely on a balance between controlled hydration, intense manual or mechanical working, and resting of the dough to develop a cohesive and resilient structure suitable for subsequent lamination, extrusion, cutting, or folding. These doughs are intended to be cooked after shaping, typically by boiling in water or broth, but also by steaming, frying, or baking, depending on the specific culinary tradition.

In the Italian context, this category includes fresh and dry pasta (such as tagliatelle, spaghetti, ravioli, tortellini, orecchiette), filled pastas from Eastern Europe (such as pelmeni, vareniki, or pierogi), as well as egg-based pastas from Central Europe (like spaetzle). In East Asia, the same principle applies to doughs for preparation like udon and soba, as well as to filled preparations like wonton, gyoza, jiaozi, or dim sum.

Depending on the specific tradition and technique, these doughs can be hand-shaped, extruded, or thinly laminated—the latter especially for creating translucent sheets, as in the case of phyllo pastry, spring roll wrappers or pasta matta.

The differences between these doughs mainly depend on the flour composition (soft wheat vs durum wheat), the degree of hydration, the possible addition of protein elements (such as whole eggs, yolks, egg whites, milk, tofu), and the working technique. From a functional standpoint, these doughs aim to contain fillings (when stuffed), support sauces or broths, or constitute the main body of the dish, thanks to their stable structure after cooking.

Classification of shaped unleavened doughs

Shaped unleavened doughs are categorized according to the specific names they take on. For historical and cultural reasons, we have chosen to dedicate a separate page entirely to Italian pasta. We can therefore divide these doughs into three main groups:

Italian pasta:

• Italian pasta

Shaped unleavened doughs in the rest of the Earth (excluding wrapper doughs):

• Gyoza
• Varenyky

Not fat-based wrapper doughs:

• Pasta matta
• Phyllo pastry