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Anyone ever cook their pasta directly in the sauce, from start to finish?
A few weeks ago I did some pasta in the pressure cooker with the sauce. While I over cooked it, I was intrigued by the idea of not using two pots and getting more flavor into the pasta itself. The experts always say to "finish" the pasta in the sauce to let it soak up some of that sauce, so why not just cook it in the sauce?
Made some rigatoni with a meat sauce last night, just using my favorite canned sauce. Figured I'd give it a shot. Did a little Googling to find out how much water 1 pound of pasta will absorb and added that much water to my meat sauce. Got it all up to boiling and added the pasta. It turned out really well. The pasta took about 1.5x the time to cook through, but the sauce came out wonderfully thickened by the extra starch from the pasta (I always add a ladle or so of starchy pasta water to the final dish to help the sauce cling).
I think this is how I'll cook most pasta from now on. It takes a little bit longer, but I don't have an extra stock pot to clean. (One thing I read, don't try this with spaghetti or a long noodle like that - they need space to move around or they stick together; not the case with tubular pastas and smaller shapes.)
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