How to Make Salmon 10x Better, According to Richard Gere

Salmon is a surprisingly versatile protein. It tastes amazing in sushi, can be layered over salads and it holds its own on any plate. But it can be tough to figure out the best way to cook salmon on any given night.

Got salmon in your fridge and are stumped on what to do with it? There’s a delicious way to take your fish to the next level that Hollywood heartthrob Richard Gere enjoys, and it involves a brown butter sauce. The sauce sounds fancy, but it involves ingredients you probably have laying around your place.

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Why Cover Salmon in Brown Butter Sauce

Besides being a clear-cut way to make and serve your salmon, layering it on top of a brown butter sauce means you’ll end up with a delicious, creamy flavor you won’t get with salmon alone. Plus, fish is known to dry out easily—pairing it with a light sauce means you’ll be able to dive into moist bites, from start to finish.

If we’re being totally honest here, a brown butter sauce is also a fairly quick way to make fish fancy. It’s not super hard to pull off but has a certain vibe you won’t get with just plopping fish on a plate. This particular sauce also has raisins and capers for a salty-sweet flavor infusion with every mouthful.

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How to Make Richard Gere’s Favorite Salmon Recipe

The recipe for Richard Gere’s favorite salmon recipe—called Roasted Scottish Salmon with Spaghetti Squash and Sweet Onion Puree—comes courtesy of Joe Monnich, chef at Philadelphia’s The Dandelion restaurant, who broke it down in detail for People magazine.

To make the spaghetti squash, cut the squash in half and season each side with salt, pepper, and olive oil. Roast them in the oven face-down in a bed of thyme and bay leaves for about 25 minutes. Then, spoon out the seeds, fork out strings of squash, and set them aside. Simmer onions in a large pot with melted butter, adding thyme, salt, a pinch of sugar and a bay leaf to the pot. Cook it for an hour on low heat, remove the onions, and purée them in a food processor or blender.

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From there, it’s on to the salmon. Cook the filets in a skillet over high heat until the outsides turn brown. Then, prep the real draw—the brown butter sauce. Cook shallots and garlic over low heat with olive oil, before adding raisins, capers, vinegar and lemon juice. In another saucepan, melt butter until it starts to brown and then add it to the other sauce ingredients. Top it off with chopped parsley and sage. Finally, add butter, salt and pepper to your spaghetti squash and put that mixture, along with the onion purée, on a plate, with the salmon layered on top. Finish the job by drizzling that brown butter sauce on top.

Whether you’re cooking for yourself or having guests over, this dish is a definite winner.

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