Josh Niland says a double cheeseburger is his signature dish. This is how to make it

When asked what his signature dish is, Sydney chef Josh Niland says he’s always found it tricky to answer. “I usually shrug the question off and say it’s more of a signature method of whole-fish cookery as opposed to a single dish,” he writes in his latest cookbook, his fourth, Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse .

“But the more I’ve thought about it over the years, the more I think this may just be it.”

You might think that the defining dish of the world-renowned chef who pioneered the fin-to-tail cooking philosophy must be the sea urchin crumpet he invented for the original Saint Peter restaurant, which opened in 2016 . Or maybe you believe it’s a dish that contains one of the more extreme ingredients such as fish eyes, scales and bones (his fish eye ice-cream is famous). Surely, it’s his beautiful charcuterie plate that’s been a decade in the making?

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“It summarises the work we have done across all our businesses, from interpreting fish as meat, whole-fish utilisation, dry-ageing and being bloody delicious,” the former Good Food Guide chef of the year writes.

Niland says he and his team came up with the idea while experimenting with ground tuna at his shop the Fish Butchery in 2018. “The result was so mind-blowingly delicious that we put it on the menu the same day.”

Good Food is not the only fan of the burger. American actor Zac Efron and Phil Rosenthal of Netflix’s Somebody Feed Phil love it too.

The recipe is one of the many in the 450-page Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse – a grand book that, as the name suggests, encapsulates Niland’s seafood ideology, and the innovative approach he and his team have to fish cooking. It’s been released on the 10th birthday of the three-hatted Saint Peter that he and wife Julie now run from Paddington’s Grand National, in Sydney’s inner east.

“It’s a record of a decade of work – not just recipes, but a new way of thinking about fish, modern craftsmanship and leadership,” says Niland. “It captures the discipline, care and clarity behind the restaurant, and the belief that every part of the fish has value.”

This is an edited extract from Saint Peter: Chapter & Verse by Josh Niland, published by Hardie Grant Books. Available in stores September 1. Photography by David Loftus.