Now I have tarragon vinegar... what to do with it?

So a few weeks ago I made some pickled beets. The Alton Brown recipe I used (which is, frankly, not sweet enough for my midwestern taste in beets; also it way underestimated roasting time) called for tarragon vinegar. Whole Foods didn't have tarragon vinegar-- hell they didn't have tarragon-- so I wound up buying two bottles of white wine vinegar and some tarragon at Tony's, and now I find myself with the better part of one bottle of white wine vinegar in which tarragon sat for a couple of weeks (one source I read said 3 weeks and the tarragon would turn bitter, so I took it out of both the vinegar and the jars of beets before then).

So what should I do with this stuff? I found what looks like the basic recipe for the obvious thing-- a whole chicken and tarragon vinegar, that's about as French* as it gets-- but I'm curious what other ideas people have.

* Just sniffing the fresh tarragon in its pack, I got an instant Proustian rush of slightly musty one-star hotels and restaurants in the French countryside. I guess I knew tarragon was one of the basics of French cooking, but somehow I haven't made much use of it to have that driven home before.

Little bottles of the stuff would make good holiday gifts or raffle prizes.

We've had tarragon vinegar in the house before, and I like it well enough, but it seems somehow so specialized (unless you're, you know, French).

David "Try in on Eggs" Hammond

cole slaw

Lots and lots of bearnaise sauce, used in place of the regular white wine vinegar.

Or, uh, salad dressing.

Yeah, good luck.

I usually toss a shot in when making hollandaise sauce.

Question:

How are the beets now? Did Alton's underestimate allow for a little more toothsome beet to break down after a few months in brine?

Tarragon Vinegar was one of my early culinary "finds." With my limited college student budget, I often shopped the bargin bins. I purchased what looked to be a 3-year old bottle of Tarragon Vinegar, for several months all my guests wanted to know what was in the salad dressing. Ahhhh... the salad days: iceberg, cardboard tomatoes, a seedy cuke and TV mixed with canola (EVOO wasn't in fashion back then )

Did Alton's underestimate allow for a little more toothsome beet to break down after a few months in brine?

Apparently not, since he also said, somewhere else that basically the same recipe appeared, that this wasn't a full-fledged brine so you should eat 'em up within a month or so.

I see a lot of salads with beets and tarragon vinegar in my immediate future.

I usually toss a shot in when making hollandaise sauce.

Does that make it into bearnaise sauce? (Since bearnaise is just hollandaise with tarragon, right?) Not a bad idea in any case, since I often make Eggs Benedict with full-fledged bearnaise, not hollandaise.

You could use it in just about anything you use white wine vinegar for, really.

it's intrinsic to cornichons, but you'd be hard pressed to find the right kind of pickling cucumbers, especially at this time of year. It still makes a nice vinaigrette that goes well with cuke salads. Tarragon vinaigrette also makes a good dressing for potato salad or nicoise and it's petty good drizzled over salmon or lightly seared tuna.

You could make potato salad.

Giovanna