The baking and pastry arts industry is a specialization within the category of food preparation and service.

Pastry is stiff dough made from flour, salt, a relatively high proportion of fat and a small proportion of liquid. It may also contain sugar or flavors. Most pastry is leavened only by the action of steam, but Danish pastry is raised with yeast. Pastry is rolled or patted out into thin sheets to line pie or tart pans and to enclose fillings. Thicker sheets may be formed into cases, pinwheels, crescents, or braids, with or without fillings and glazes or icings.

Baking this fast-paced industry can be competitive, high turnover can create room for ambitious budding chefs. The field of baking and pastry arts is a small part of the larger industry of food preparation which is very interesting for baking for beginners.

There are five basic types of pastry. These are short crust pastry, filo pastry, choux pastry, flaky pastry and puff pastry. Two main types of pastry are non-laminated, when fat is cut or rubbed into the flour, and laminated, when fat is repeatedly folded into the dough using a technique called lamination.

Variations in technique and ingredients yield pastries of varying texture. For a flaky pastry, low-gluten flour is quickly blended with butter, lard or vegetable shortening so that the fat is broken into bits. A minimum of liquid is used and the pastry is handled as little as possible. The extreme of flaky pastry is formed by folding and refolding a butter-filled pastry to form hundreds of layers of flour and butter that rise in the oven to 12 times the height of the uncooked pastry. Yeast dough is layered with butter in a similar manner to produce wienbrod, or Danish pastry. A short pastry is one in which the ingredients are well amalgamated so that the baked pastry is tender and fine-textured, tending to crumble rather than flake. In pastries requiring tensile strength, high-gluten flour is preferred with eggs and a higher proportion of liquid adding to the malleability of the dough. Phyllo and strudel pastries are of this type, rolled or stretched out to paper thinness.

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