Aug. 25, 2022

A field-to-plate food truck from the co-owner of a local brewery makes its Sioux Falls debut Friday.

Lee Anderson, who has a culinary degree from Le Cordon Bleu, has started The Homestead Terroir Kitchen. With a passion for fermentation and smoking meat and a commitment to using local products, Anderson will offer a unique menu.

Pairings of food with beers made by A Homestead Brew, which he owns with his mother and brother on their family farm, will be common, he said.

“Similar to our tap list, it’ll always be rotating. I’ll try to pick things that pair with what we’re doing.”

Friday’s menu during Slamdakota Death Fest at Bigs Bar on West 12th Street, will feature such pairings, with A Homestead Brew’s offerings available in the bar, including one made just for the event. Anderson is making a smoked brisket sandwich with onion rings and a beer cheese using Homestead’s Vienna lager.

He’ll also serve French toast sticks with breakfast sausages and a blueberry maple syrup that’s made with one of the brewery’s sour beers.

On Sept. 2, The Homestead Terroir Kitchen, which at this point is still a plain white trailer, will be at the brewery east of Sioux Falls on the family farm. Anderson will be making smoked salmon charcuterie boards with pickled duck eggs.

“It’s a lot of fun to make different things, to have a food truck not necessarily set to anything,” he said. “I want to keep bringing people out, I want to keep it fresh and new and interesting.”

In the future, he envisions menu items like double cheeseburgers with a Flamin’ Hot Cheetos dust and a gouda dipping sauce, smoked Hutterite colony chickens, ceviche, ramen and stuffed squash blossoms with a reduction of the brewery’s Flanders Red, which becomes like a mock balsamic.

Experimenting the other day, he created a smoked duck ravioli, making the pasta by hand. He paired the duck with trumpet mushrooms from Dakota Mushrooms & Mircrogreens and made a sauce with a hand-foraged sage and lemon beurre blanc, deglazing the pan with homemade plum wine.

He makes his own vinegars and has a homemade soy sauce brewing that will be ready in another year.

Even the wood pellets for his smoker are custom. Anderson makes them out of the barrels that have been used to age Homestead’s beer.

He sources meat from nearby lockers and Hutterite colonies and vegetables from Tillford Rye Farm and Cherry Rock Farms.

While the food truck “will probably live 90 percent of its life on the farm,” Anderson said it will be available for limited public and private events in the area.

“It’s got to integrate into what we are doing,” he said of keeping the farm and brewery running.

Anderson Hop Farm started in 2012, and A Homestead Brew began five years later. As the hop market started to fall, they’ve shifted more into fruit, putting almost 500 plants in the ground last year and more this year with a grant from Pheasants Forever. They’re growing peaches, apples, cherries, plums, elderberries, aronia berries, and golden and red currents.

The remaining rows of hops are used for their own brewing.

With all of that work, The Homestead Terroir Kitchen won’t be available every weekend at the brewery, Anderson said. It will continue to invite other food trucks out on occasional Friday and Saturday nights. As those food truck owners have provided customers with a dining option over the years, they’ve become friends, Anderson said, and he wants to keep them as part of the community that Homestead has built.

That growing community led to a recent expansion. A Homestead Brew doubled the size of its taproom, now seating 110 people. That will enable it to host more weddings and other private parties, Anderson said.

“I’m really excited to start doing beer dinners,” he said. “We’ll probably do one every six weeks through winter until spring. It could be sooner than that (more frequent) depending on the response.”

A Homestead Brew at 26685 486th Ave. is open from 5 to 9 p.m. Friday and 2 to 9 p.m. Saturday. Find updates on brewery events and food truck locations on its Facebook page.

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