Saffron sauce is one of my all-time favorite sauces for fish, poultry and even certain mushrooms. It shines like the sun and tastes rich, grassy and bright. Here’s how I make it. 

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Ratatouille,” you may recall that Remy the Rat could see flavors in color. I do this with seasons. Winter is burnt umber, black and ivory, the colors of deep sauces and stored roots. Summer, on the other hand, is a carnival riot: Reds and oranges and purples and vibrance all around. It’s a crazy-quilt of color.

Spring is easier. Spring is all about spring green — that vivid, bright emerald that always has a yellow cast to it. This is the green of new growth. Yellow, the canary of mustard flowers and the school-bus yellow of dandelion flowers, compliment that green. Each year I try to design a dish that celebrates those colors.

That’s where saffron sauce comes in. This recipe is a simple piece of fish, with simply cooked greens, served with a saffron sauce to easy to make you will wonder you have not made it before.

What’s the Best Saffron? 

This is a hot topic, with many opinions. I always buy “coupe grade” Spanish saffron, but Iranian and Kashmiri saffron is every bit as good. Saffron is insanely expensive because it’s the stamens on a particular kind of crocus, and they must be picked by hand. An ounce will cost you $50 or more. 

The best grades of saffron are whole stamens. This is important because the aroma of saffron, that grassy, bright loveliness, is strongest right when you crush the saffron — the less broken the stamens are, the stronger the aroma. And for this saffron sauce, you want that aroma. 

Do not buy Mexican azafran. Fully named Corrales azafran, it comes from safflowers and while it will turn a dish yellow, it has no aroma. 

If you are worried about the cost of making a saffron sauce, don’t. You use just a pinch, and the stamens keep for two years in their little tin. 

Making the Saffron Sauce

This sauce hinges on orange and saffron, a classic combination. Lemon would be good too, although it’s awfully acidic; Meyer lemons would be best. Tangerines, pink grapefruit or limas, the sweet limes from the Yucatan, would be other good options. 

My saffron sauce has echoes of a gastrique, a French sauce made of vinegar and sugar. I use a touch of sugar here, but the citrus and some white wine provide the brightness. 

Butter, swirled in at the end the way you do in a piccata, calms everything down and adds body and richness to the saffron sauce. 

What to Serve with Saffron Sauce?

Usually, this is a saffron sauce with fish, and usually that fish is trout. Both are springtime specialties. But most fish would work here: Any white meat fish you can think of, from sole to bass to walleye and snapper, as well as any “orange” fish — the trout, char and salmon family. 

Saffron sauce is also fantastic with chicken, rabbit or other white meats, even pork. I love it with partridges. 

For this specific recipe, I used cutthroat trout from Pyramid Lake in Nevada. No great story here, although the catching of the trout on Pyramid Lake was pretty cool, and the greens are an unusual variety of amaranth I grow in my garden (spinach would be a good alternative). This is just a great, simple dish you can actually whip up on a weeknight. Really. It only looks fancy.

If you want something a little less bracing and creamier, but is still a pretty saffron sauce, try my saffron aioli.