From market to table, a chef brings back the adventure in cooking

A handful of friends, London expatriates, were sitting around talking about what they missed about the city, and while the weather did not top the list for obvious reasons, a proper English roast did. “So I said, all right, guys, come round to my house tomorrow and I’m going to cook you a roast pork with roast potatoes, cauliflower cheese, and bread and butter pudding,” Hylton Le Roux recalls.

The next morning, they filmed him at the chaotic Alabang markets buying a pork loin from the fastest butcher he’s ever met, and coming back to the kitchen to demonstrate how to get the potatoes nice and crunchy.

“I love entertaining, and before we came up with the concept for the show, I said, why don’t we just slap a camera down and film me doing this?”

The final product: Pumpkin risotto drizzled with chorizo oil Photos by RYAN FERNANDEZ

Produced by Original Pinoy Madness (with director Robert Lyren and producers Graeme Perkins and David Rapaport), whose first project was the tattoo show Vice Ink, the new TV series, Market to Master, is casual, unscripted, and spontaneous as far as cooking shows go. Hylton doesn’t bring out the measuring cups or scales — he can eye roughly how much 125 grams of an ingredient is. “I cook by the seat of my pants and hopefully when people see this they’ll get excited about cooking again,” he says. The South African-born chef is adamant about doing things proper: with natural ingredients and the best produce one can find. He has, amazingly, only had fast food hamburger twice in his life, and both times he was very, very drunk. “I grew up watching my mom cook. When she made a burger it was very good, so we never really wanted fast food.”

He passes on the same principles to his young son Cameron, who at two years old can tell you what pesto is made of. He’s the one kid who will refuse fast food spaghetti at birthday parties, although he loves spaghetti. “His teacher must think, what a snob! But I’m just trying to educate my son on where food comes from,” he explains. “Beef comes from a cow. Chicken does not come from a fast food counter.”

Hylton’s culinary journey from South Africa to the Philippines comes by way of the UK, and he’s toiled in the fiery furnaces of Gordon Ramsay’s kitchens as well as the laboratory-like ones of Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck, the Michelin-starred molecular gastronomy restaurant. On Ramsay, he says: “If you saw what he did in the kitchen, you couldn’t show that on television.” On molecular gastronomy: “It’s exciting and shows what you can do with food. Once you can stick two pieces of meat together, you can do anything. But it’s not like you’re going to go home and cook that. You can’t beat a good cheese sandwich.”

To market, to market: “Hopefully people will see that cooking is exciting and fun, and not stressful, and will get back to the kitchen.”

After years of working under insanely stressful conditions and never getting to see his wife, Hylton decided to take a step back and get back to where he can enjoy cooking and appreciate food again. He’s been in the Philippines for all of two years and found that he’s a lot calmer now then when he was in London. He launched his catering business, Pi Catering, six months ago, and has recently wrapped filming of Market to Master’s first season. “When you’re working there you sort of become one of those angry guys,” he says. “The catering company sort of allows me to do what I want to do.”

Despite his credentials, Hylton did not come from a culinary school background. He moved to London from Cape Town when he was 18 and his first job in the industry consisted of washing dishes and mopping floors, then moving up to peeling carrots and potatoes, all the while being observant and asking a lot of questions. But even before that, his training began at home, with a mom who taught him how to make hollandaise sauce at the age of 10 and a dad who would barbecue three times a week using his special secret marinade. “In the UK, I don’t think culinary school is that important,” he says. “If you’ve got a passion for something you will learn it as fast as you can.”

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Market to Master premieres on Sept. 7 at 6:30 p.m. on ANC.