State Fair Cooking Contests
Camaraderie Over Competition
Words by Anna Kinder / Photos by Charlie Neuenschwander
A.) “I’ve placed in every competition but that one. It's my mountain—my Everest. I'm gonna get there one day.”
B.) “She isn’t my arch-nemesis; she’s the person I wanna be when I grow up.”
C.) “I learned by making peach jelly with my mom. We’d pick peaches, eat some as we prepared the juice, laugh, and talk in the hot kitchen with the steam rising and the smell of fresh peaches.”
When most people hear “fair food,” they think of deep-fried butter, funnel cakes, and other artery-clogging indulgences—often served on a stick. Not Cassidy Eastwood. A former French teacher who now splits her working hours between Savory Spice and Urban Agrarian, Cassidy has been competing in state fair cooking contests for the last three years. And she’s not alone.
If you move beyond the neon signage, carnival rides, and sugar-spun clouds of cotton candy most people associate with the Oklahoma State Fair, you’ll find a quirky little world nestled inside the Creative Arts Building filled with people just like her. Diehard bakers who find the whir of a KitchenAid mixer more thrilling than a Tilt-a-Whirl. Canning enthusiasts who’d rather listen to the “ping” of a successful seal than the guitar licks coming from the main stage. Seasoned home cooks who could hold their own in any restaurant kitchen, but prefer to cook for their families in lieu of the masses.
The idea of competing with your neighbors to see who can bake the best pie is an ancient ritual that’s administered in somewhat modern fashion by the Oklahoma State Fair, Inc., a 501(c)(3), with some sponsorship help from the likes of Shawnee Mills and the Made in Oklahoma Coalition. Every year, contest information is posted online in July—this year’s PDF clocked in at 30 pages. It’s clear this is a culture of constant learning, experimenting, and fine-tuning. Though there are only 35 divisions, that figure is a bit misleading, as some have upward of 30 classes (looking at you, Bread Baking). There are two types of competitions: pre-judged and live. Cassidy prefers the latter. In 2022, her first year of competing, she took home a blue ribbon for her prized chicken pot pie. And in 2024, she snagged another one for her egg and chorizo burritos in the grab-and-go division of the Eggcellent OK Breakfast Cook-Off, as well as Best of Show. This year, she’s planning to enter breakfast enchiladas, but as of this writing, she is still trying to nail down her recipe.
Cassidy didn’t sign up to be my “fair godmother,” but she’s a good sport about it, at least. She’s slightly evangelical about the cooking contests in general, telling everyone she knows that the contests are free to enter, and contestants get free entry into the fair on the day of their event. I’m an amateur ice cream artist, so the “From Cow to Cone” Homemade Ice Cream Contest especially piques my interest, and as she walks me through the three categories—vanilla, fruit, and mix-ins—my brain can’t help but start churning out flavor ideas. I can tell that, to even stand a chance of placing in any category in this scene, having a borderline obsession is a prerequisite, and ice cream is my only culinary exploit that fits the bill. Although you must be an amateur to enter any division, AKA someone who earns less than 10% of their income from the skill at hand, it sounds like the competition in this one is stiffer than a perfectly whipped peak of heavy cream, so we’ll see how I fare. “I’ve placed in every competition I've entered except for that one. It's my mountain—my Everest,” Cassidy sighs. “I'm gonna get there one day.” Even though she hasn’t placed, Cassidy still loves competing in the ice cream contest, if only for the taste-testing privileges it affords her. “Last year, the winner made mint chocolate chip and steeped fresh mint leaves in the cream. Oh my god, it was so good,” she gushes.
Cassidy says that many folks enter the same contests year after year, and the same contestants often compete in multiple divisions, so they get to know each other fairly well. But despite this camaraderie, the competition can still get heated. Last year, Cassidy and her friends were hanging out after the fair when they noticed that a woman, Pamela Kloiber, had placed in something like 90 of the 93 pre-judged classes. “We had this joke that I was going to beat her someday,” Cassidy laughs. And one time, she actually did. “My oatmeal raisin cookies got second, and hers got fourth, and I was like, ‘I did it.’ Biggest accomplishment of my life!” But after Cassidy and her friends did some research on Pam, Cassidy changed her tune. “She’s a saint,” Cassidy decided. “I can’t compete with her. She isn’t my arch-nemesis; she’s the person I wanna be when I grow up.”
Pam Kloiber founded Team Tinker Home Away From Home in 2012, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that pairs first-term service members with civilian host families to help ease the anxiety of being away from home, often for the first time. She tasks many of these young men and women with taste-testing her fair entries, and I doubt they mind given the staggering 1,718 ribbons under her belt. Pam entered the world of state fair cooking contests in 1982, starting with jelly, followed by jam and preserves. “I learned by making peach jelly with my mom. We’d pick peaches, eat some as we prepared the juice, laugh, and talk in the hot kitchen with the steam rising and the smell of fresh peaches.”
Her grandmother was the baker of the family. “Her sugar cookies were so yummy! She broke all the rules and never measured. I can still see her there as I stood by her side. Building a well in a bowl of flour. Adding the eggs and other ingredients,” Pam reminisces.
Pam drew inspiration from these memories for her submission in the 2012 “Cookie Jar” contest. That division is an outlier in that it involves both baking and a decorating element—and the latter is not necessarily what you’d expect. On top of baking the cookies, contestants must also decorate their jars to align with the annual themes, which happened to be “homegrown fun” the year that Pam won. It was bittersweet, as Pam had just completed breast cancer treatment and her mom was in hospice, so she used the contest as an opportunity to process these experiences. She incorporated her childhood baking set into the topper, plus a collection of cookie recipes, family photos, and a heartfelt poem that includes the lines: “Three generations of homegrown fun/now without Grandmother and Mother, we are down to one.” Though her mother passed before she got to see the blue ribbon, Pam got to show her the cookie jar and explain its significance before dropping it off.
I know what Cassidy meant. Pam is the kind of person who makes you want to be the best version of yourself—the one who calls her parents on a regular basis and makes time for the things that matter, like spending the weekend learning how to make her mom’s chicken noodles and cinnamon rolls from scratch instead of just talking about it. “Sadly, you really need to do that, because you never know how long you’ll have your family members,” Pam tells me, and I listen, texting my mom and sister right after the interview and asking them to put a date on the calendar. Beneath the competitive exterior of these contests, you’ll find a group of sentimental folks who have mastered the art of preserving—whether they fill their jars with peaches, prized recipes, or precious keepsakes. It’s a culture of camaraderie and constant learning, and no matter how my “From Cow to Cone” foray goes, I’m looking forward to making some new friends and feeding off the creative energy—both figuratively and literally.
Oklahoma State Fair, Sept. 11-21 at Oklahoma City Fair Park, okstatefair.com. The cooking competitions take place in the Creative Arts Building.
