I definitely want to give this a shot. Has anybody tried making pasta this way?

It is extremely difficult making pasta this way unless you have this kind of pot. Mainly because the pasta will end up sticking together and become one huge congealed mess with the sauce. What I usually do to make the pasta sauce creamier and stiffer is to add the pasta water. That usually does the trick and you can control how "starchy" you want your sauce to be.

Whole wheat pasta FTW! LOL eh, I prefer a tastier sauce over tastier pasta anyways....Now they need to create a pot where you push a button and it gets it's own ingredients and calls you when it's done cooking. That's some real food for thought ;-)

I was with it until I read "consistency of risotto". Somehow, that just doesn't sound very appetizing.

I tried this method of pasta preparation when The New York Times published a similar, if somewhat more complex recipe by Alain Ducasse, a few years back. There was quite a bit of preparatory toiling needed--as in most Ducasse recipes-- since lots of vegetables were needed and we were instructed to cut them in precise sizes. Other than that, however, the recipe was a breeze. The results are quite outstanding and the delicately layered flavors (I am talking specifically of that recipe, not of the cooking technique,) meld into quite a luxuriant experience. The consistency of the pasta, far from being unappetizing as suggested by jumbybay, can be exactly as "al dente" as a traditionally cooked pasta. It is the texture of the sauce that envelops the flavors, and the way the sauce binds to the pasta and the vegetables, and also the way the pasta seems flavored "from the inside" that makes this approach to cooking pasta unique. I encourage you all to try these recipes, which look as sensuously composed as the one I refer to above.

If interested in tracking back the original recipe, its called strozzapretti something or the other... sorry, but don't have a copy handy.