For The Most Flavorful Salmon You've Ever Tasted, Make It Cowboy Style

As an entrée, salmon is usually dressed with light, sophisticated ingredients — a splash of lemon, garlic, and fresh herbs is a typical combo. If you're in the mood for something different, a sticky glaze can do the trick. But there's another special way to bring more flavor than you ever thought possible to salmon, and that's with a cowboy-style butter.

Back in the days of the Old West, cowboy-style cooking was a way for cowboys to make the best of the sometimes limited food in their inventory. This usually meant slow-cooking a mix of meat and nonperishable ingredients and spices over an open fire, and the flavors of BBQ and Tex-Mex cuisines are general guiding principles for this type of food. Mixing up a cowboy-spiced butter is the easiest and tastiest trick to adapt this cooking style into your modern kitchen and your weeknight baked salmon recipes.

A cowboy-inspired compound butter is infused with Tex-Mex spices like smoked paprika, cayenne, and cumin, as well as fresh herbs and maybe even some lime or lemon zest. Slathered on top of salmon, it weaves an herbaceous and savory bite into the fish's natural flavors. Depending on the ingredients added, it might also carry a subtle heat or smokiness, taking the fish a notch above its usual mild tone. The butter itself bastes the salmon in that signature richness and keeps the meat flaky and moist.

Add different ingredients to your cowboy butter to steer the flavors in your preferred direction. Perhaps use Dijon mustard for an elevated flavor, or take a note from Louisiana cuisine and use Cajun seasoning. Chopped parsley or cilantro, onion powder, and garlic powder are all cowboy cooking staples as well. For a bit of sweetness, add some brown sugar into the mixture. You can even further enrich and thicken your buttery sauce with heavy cream. However, make sure to carefully whisk or blend it into the mixture at the end of cooking so the heat doesn't affect its consistency; this essential step will prevent the cream from curdling.

A cast-iron skillet or Dutch oven is one of the signature hallmarks of cowboy cooking, as cast-iron retains heat and sears food incredibly well, so if you have either of these utensils, bust them out for your salmon. Other than that, incorporating this new twist into your dish isn't too different from the usual routine. Start by making a sauce with the melted butter and your ingredients of choice, and then pour it over the salmon partway through baking. Butter-baste the fish every few minutes until the meat is cooked and the sauce has thickened a bit.

As salmon is always better with a few companions on the side, you can give those extra components the cowboy treatment too. This might be roasting the veggies with the cowboy butter or similar seasonings. Rustic veggies such as potatoes, carrots, bell peppers, and tomatoes are all good choices. You can even pair them with slow-cooked pinto beans or black-eyed peas for a bulkier meal. For fresher, lighter flavors, a cowboy caviar pasta salad with beans and cheese would perfectly complement your Western salmon dish.