User:Bellsam4/Bear claw (pastry)

Bear claw
Type	Pastry, doughnut or fritter
Course	Dessert
Place of origin	United States
Serving temperature	Warm, room temperature
Main ingredients	Dough, almond paste
Ingredients generally used	Raisins

This is a user sandbox of Bellsam4. You can use it for testing or practicing edits.
This is not the sandbox where you should draft your assigned article for a dashboard.wikiedu.org course.
To find the right sandbox for your assignment, visit your Dashboard course page and follow the Sandbox Draft link for your assigned article in the My Articles section.

Get Help

A bear claw is a sweet, yeast-raised pastry, a type of Danish, originating in the United States during the mid-1920s.^[1] In Denmark a bear claw is referred to as kamme.^[2] The name bear claw as used for a pastry is first attested in 1936.^[3] The phrase is more common in Western American English,^[1] and is included in the U.S. Regional Dialect Survey Results, Question #87, "Do you use the term 'bear claw' for a kind of pastry?"^[4]

Ingredients/Shape

Most Danish's include the same basic ingredients such as eggs, yeast, flour, milk, sugar, and butter.^[2] The bear claw is also made with "sweet dough" which is "bread dough with more shortening than usual".^[5] One of the differences between most Danish's, besides taste, is seen in their shape.^[2] A bear claw is usually filled with almond paste,^[6] and sometimes raisins, and often shaped in a semicircle with slices along the curved edge, or rectangular with partial slices along one side.^[7] As the dough rises, the sections separate, evoking the shape of a bear's toes, hence the name.^[8] A bear claw may also be a yeast doughnut in a shape similar to that of the pastry.^[8] Such doughnuts may have an apple pie-style filling, or other fillings such as butter pecan, dates, cream cheese, grape or cherry.

Production

A bear claw can be made by hand or by machine.^[9] Bear claw can be hand-made by using a bear claw cutter that was invented in 1950 by James Fennell.^[10] A 1948 patent describes the process of assembling the bear claw as rolling out the dough, layering filling onto it, folding the dough over, cutting small incisions to create the claw-like look, and finally cutting the dough into separate pastries.^[9] The pastry can be curved into a half-circle at this point, which causes the "toes" to separate.^[11]

Health and Nutrition

The bear claw from a fast food restaurant, Panera, is mostly made up of fats and carbohydrates with a small portion of it being protein.^[12] For this specific commercial bear claw, 200 calories are coming from fats while the pastry as a whole totals about 500 calories. ^[12] That is 23 grams of sugar per bear claw. ^[12] Eating too many sweet pastries can cause drowsiness for some people due to a sugar crash, which is when you eat something sweet like a bear claw and get an energy boost but then soon after loose all the energy and get tired.^[13] Overall, bear claws are a sweet treat that should be consumed in a moderate and healthy way.

References

^ ^a ^b "Bear claw". Dictionary of American Regional English. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
^ ^a ^b ^c Roufs, Timothy G., and Kathleen Smyth Roufs. Sweet Treats around the World: An Encyclopedia of Food and Culture. ABC-CLIO, 2014. Gale eBooks, https://link.gale.com/apps/pub/8NLE/GVRL?u=wash_main&sid=GVRL. Accessed 16 Oct. 2020.
^ "Bear Claw". Merriam-Webster.com. Retrieved Feb 4, 2016.
^ "Dialect Survey Results". Joshua Katz, Department of Statistics, NC State University. Archived from the original on 6 June 2013. Retrieved 8 June 2013.
^ “Frozen Cakes and Pastries.” ID : the Voice of Foodservice Distribution, vol. 29, no. 11, 1993, p. 113.
^ FrancesC. "Almond Bear Claws". Allrecipes.com. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
^ Della-Piana, Patricia. J'eat? Playful Cookery. Lulu. p. 356. ISBN 9781300921059.
^ ^a ^b Pastry, Joe. "The Bear Claw". Joe Pastry. Retrieved 4 September 2012.
^ ^a ^b Le, Conie Stiles (Jan 13, 1948), Production of coffee cakes, retrieved 2016-03-24. US Patent US 2434339 A. Filed 1944-03-22. Granted 1948-01-13.
^ C, Fennell James. “Bear Claw Cutter.” 1950.
^ Mushet, Cindy, Sur La Table (2008-10-21). "Bear Claw". The Art and Soul of Baking. Andrews McMeel Publishing. p. 118. ISBN 9780740773341.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^ ^a ^b ^c "Panera Bear Claw Nutrition Facts". FastFoodNutrition.org. Retrieved 2020-10-29.
^ Staples, David. “Frank's Days of Sweet Surrender Are Over.” Edmonton Journal, 1998, pp. Edmonton journal, 1998–04-26.