Katherine Berkowitz, Lawrence, bakes bread in her kitchen. Berkowitz bakes twice a week for family and friends, and has had numerous award-winning entries in her years entering the open baking contest at the Douglas County Fair.

Aliene Bieber’s homemade cherry pie is just what the baking judge ordered.

The sugar-sprinkled crust is golden and flaky throughout, and even the crimped edge is tender enough to cut easily with a flimsy plastic fork. The filling is full of fruit flavor, slightly tart but not sour, and firm enough that a few cherries may fall behind but the slice holds its shape when transferred to a plate.

Aliene Bieber, Lawrence, displays a homemade cherry pie while an apple pie cools on the stove behind her. Bieber is a long-time participant in the Douglas County Fair open baking contest, where her pies have won champion and reserve champion ribbons for years.

Harold Agnew, Lawrence, displays the champion ribbon his basil and chive bagels won at the 2011 Douglas County Fair open baking contest.

Katherine Berkowitz, Lawrence, bakes twice a week for family and friends and has had numerous award-winning entries in her years entering the open baking contest at the Douglas County Fair. Her specialties are yeast breads, such as this loaf of challah, and cakes.

Bieber’s pies are legendary at the Douglas County Fair, where she’s been entering — and often winning — the open baking contest for decades.

“She is the queen,” said fellow baker Katherine Berkowitz, Lawrence. “She has no equal.”

For the past few years, Bieber, Berkowitz and Harold Agnew, all Lawrence residents, have repeatedly topped the list of winners in the open contest. Not only do they all love baking, they’ve also put in a lot of practice.

That shows in their ability to turn out quality baked items year after year, said Susan Johnson, K-State Research and Extension of Douglas County agent for Family and Consumer Sciences, who added that judges are trained in food science, change each year and typically come from outside the county.

This year’s open baking competition is coming up next week — entries are due Monday, with judging the following morning.

About 40 people typically enter the contest, each bringing multiple items. But Johnson would like to see that number grow.

“Home-baked, quality items are something that is going to be a lost art if we don’t keep up this tradition,” she said. “It’s a skill to learn how to bake quality products.”

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Bieber has been practicing more years than most — she’s 80, and she’s been baking pies since she was about 8.

She grew up on a ranch in western Kansas, where she was the oldest of five siblings. Her mother didn’t particularly like baking so she left most of it to Bieber.

“I’ve been doing it for a long, long time,” Bieber said. “I think it’s just trial and error.”

Bieber said she’d probably enter a pie or two in the President’s Pie Baking Contest this year but not the open contest as she has in years past. She’s had some health problems, she said, so it depends on how much energy she has.

If not as much as she used to, Bieber still bakes pie for family — her husband, David, is always in the kitchen “looking for a little crumb of something,” she said — and for her church, where she used to be the funeral meal coordinator.

Many of the younger ladies turned to box-mix cakes for the grieving families, but Bieber kept up her handmade pies.

“Some people think it’s too much work, but I don’t,” she said. “I love to bake.”

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Agnew’s first foray into bread-baking were a far cry from the basil and chive bagels that won the champion ribbon at last year’s fair.

Agnew, a stay-at-home father of two, started baking to pass time between feedings and diaper changing after his first child was born. He baked a lot of quick breads, began to realize he was “going through more butter and sugar than a healthy person should,” then decided to try yeast breads instead.

His initial results, he said, were more like adobe bricks than loaves of bread.

Things began looking up after Agnew’s wife bought him an explanatory cookbook, Peter Reinhart’s “The Bread Baker’s Apprentice.”

“Once I had the mechanics down and understood more of how things worked, I just kept playing around,” Agnew said.

Agnew sold bagels at the farmers market for a couple years but said preparing that many by hand every week began to do a number on his tendons. He now bakes on a more occasional basis.

Agnew has only entered the open foods contest twice. In his first year, 2010, his rosemary onion bagels nabbed a reserve champion ribbon. Last year, those basil and chive bagels took the top prize.

“That was really, really cool,” Agnew said, but he doesn’t feel pressure to defend his title. He doesn’t think he’ll enter this year.

“I couldn’t think of a flavor that just called out to be entered,” he said. “I would rather wait another year and think for months, ‘This flavor would be perfect.'”

He is, however, busy helping work on fair projects with his 10-year-old daughter, Parvaneh Karch-Agnew, who has won ribbons for her own baking.

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Berkowitz didn’t start out great at baking, either.

Berkowitz said that after she and her husband got married, he wanted her to learn to bake bread. She spent a day as an apprentice with a bread-baking friend, then took some sourdough starter home to try on her own. For a month or more, she said, everything she made was flat and “dreadful.” Another month or so later, she ran into that friend’s husband at the store, and he asked, “By the way, did my wife remember to tell you that starter was dead?”

Berkowitz said she bought a yeast bread cookbook and “never looked back.”

She bakes almost every Friday and Sunday for her own household and some family and friends. She’s entered the fair’s open foods contest more than 20 years, specializing in breads and cakes. Winning is nice — her whole wheat bread won reserve champion last year, and she’s even won the state fair’s sweepstakes for cakes — but she said she most enjoys the camaraderie of other home cooks who participate.

“If it’s about the competition — and that’s all it is — then that’s not fun,” she said.

Berkowitz also enjoys sharing her skills with others.

She teaches baking classes at a Hy-Vee in Topeka, where she tells students, “Everybody can do this.”

After her last bread class, Berkowitz got a note in the mail from a woman who said she took what she’d learned, went home and baked a loaf of challah for her husband.

“She just felt so empowered that she could do this,” Berkowitz said, “and that made me feel wonderful.”

Berkowitz said her top baking tips are to read the recipe thoroughly, use good fresh ingredients and enjoy what you’re doing.

“If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, she said, “it’s going to show up in how it turns out.”