On the menu at Sister’s Rock Restaurant

The eatery makes the most of homegrown truffles, persimmons, apples and cherries, while the onsite smokehouse uses vineyard and orchard trimmings to make smallgoods. Here’s what’s on the menu.

What are some highlights of your menu?

Our food is country-style and hearty. We do a lot of smoking, fermenting and cooking on the barbecue. One dish that’s going well is a hanger steak cooked over a mix of charcoal and cherry wood. We serve it with roasted beetroot puree and pumpkin that’s sliced really fine then pickled. The trim from the beetroot is turned into a powder with native pepper and we season the pumpkin with that. You get sweetness from the pumpkin and pickle, the earthiness of the beetroot and the charred smokiness of the beef.

Hangar Steak at Sister’s Rock Restaurant, Borrodell Estate

How might you use fermented ingredients?

We do a pork neck entree which has a few fermented elements. We marinate the pork in koji, a Japanese ferment that’s part of the sake-making process. We cook the meat sous vide then glaze it with sake, honey and chicken jus and barbecue it, so you get amazing salty, umami flavours. We serve it with rhubarb that we ferment as well, plus nasturtium leaves from the garden and little deep-fried potato straws for crunch.

Pork Neck, Sister’s Rock Restaurant 

It’s so special to have truffles on the estate! What do you do with them?

We make truffle salt, butter and honey, and we offer fresh truffle in the restaurant as a supplement – we’ll grate it over dishes that work really well with truffles. They’re excellent with the pork neck and also a braised wild rabbit dish we do. Surprisingly, they can be great with desserts, too. We’ve done a salted caramel ice-cream with truffle that was really good, and we offer them now with our cheesecake.

Borrodell Cheesecake with truffle, Sister’s Rock Restaurant

Tell us more about this cheesecake!

We do lots of desserts but the star at the moment is our warm Basque-style cheesecake with house-made ricotta and a ginger biscuit base. Also on the plate is an Italian meringue and persimmon sorbet, made with an old heritage variety of persimmons that we grow here.