Yonkers-based Hudson Green makes meatless, dairy free pasta sauces
Marie Rama has been in the food industry for more than 25 years — as a pastry chef, cookbook author, and a spokesperson for national food companies.
But when her husband nearly suffered a heart attack four years ago and had to drastically change his eating habits, she made it her mission to create dishes he loved with ingredients that fit his new dietary restrictions.
And that meant no meat, limited amounts of oil, salt, sugar and fat, and no dairy. Plus, lots of vegetables.
After lots of shredding, carmelizing, mincing, stirring, blending and experimenting, she came up with a meatless Bolognese sauce made from six different vegetables including cauliflower, carrots, mushrooms, onions and three types of tomatoes. (It also has walnuts.)
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Her sauce was so close to the real thing — she shared it with friends and family — that folks kept telling her she should sell it. Which lead to countless discussions and more experimentation.
In 2018, the Yonkers resident, now joined by her son (and business partner) Will Reiter, a lawyer by trade, officially launched Hudson Green, a plant-based food business. Rama said she worked with Cornell’s Food Venture Center to safely jar the sauce and bring it to market. Her husband, Mark, is now an avid vegan while Rama herself has drastically changed her diet and become a vegetarian.
Hudson Green presently has two sauces, an organic six-vegetable Bolognese and a dairy-freeVelvet Vodka, with a third (a marinara) in the works.
Sauces are sold at various local outlets including Bronxville Natural in Bronxville, Hutchinson Farms in Scarsdale, Bedford Gourmet in Bedford and Green Organic Market in Hartsdale, as well as at Wegmans in Harrison and, come January, at all Westchester Whole Foods. It is also available online.
For the holidays, the two are donating free jars of their Bolognese to two local food banks, The Ridgeway Church Food Pantry in White Plains and the Yonkers YWCA. For each jar of sauce sold on their website in December, they will give away a jar.
“The goal,” said Rama, “is to ‘gift-away’ at least 200 jars of sauce.”
Making good healthy, organic (and often gluten-free) food has become a passion for the mother-son duo who have seen first-hand the benefits of a healthier diet. Her husband, for one, has lost 20 pounds, drastically lowered his cholesterol and feels better than ever. And though Rama was never one to eat junk food, she, too, notices a change.
“We both feel as though we can now eat as much plant-based food as we want without worrying about putting on pounds,” she said. “My husband, especially, no longer has a love-hate relationship with food. He used to crave foods — especially high in fat, salt and sugar — and then feel remorse after eating them,” Rama said.
“And while we’ve always thought of food as a way to stay fit and healthy, we realized, even though we consider ourselves to be fairly sophisticated about food, we were not paying close enough attention to what we were eating.”
Want to buy?
Go to hudson-green.com.
Jeanne Muchnick covers food and dining. Click here for her most recent articles and follow her latest dining adventures on Instagram @lohud_food or via the lohudfood newsletter.
