Every year, it seems, I try a new herb in the garden that surprises me with the intriguing dimensions of flavor it adds to my cooking. Last year it was oregano, which pepped up our salads in unexpected ways. This year, it’s tarragon, which I never really thought of before as anything other than a slender stalk in vinegar bottles.
How wrong I was. The French, it seems, were onto tarragon long before I was, designating it one of four essential herbs in their fines herbes and using it as an essential ingredient in Béarnaise sauce. The first time I snipped some into a salad this summer, the burst of flavor was unlike anything I’d ever tasted—with a kapow, zip, and zing that made me sit up a little straighter in my chair. My husband and I have since added it to scrambled eggs and even an herb sauce for fish. (There’s no special recipe for that. My husband just takes handfuls of all the garden herbs—mint, thyme, tarragon, rosemary, oregano, basil—and tosses it all into the blender.)
I immediately went in search of tarragon recipes and found a zinger of a salad dressing with tarragon, finely grated ginger, garlic, and chopped scallions (photo, above). But my new aspiration is to make this amazing-looking recipe–Tarragon Olive Oil Ice Cream from The Bojon Gourmet. I rarely post photos that aren’t my own, but this one from Bojon’s site just looked too delicious to pass up!