Played around with dehydrated tortelloni yesterday. Sorta worked. I dehydrated sauce and ground beef the usual way, cooked the tortelloni to slightly firmer than al dente and dehydrated it. I measured all the water that I took out by weighing the trays before and after drying. Then I tried making it as a single-pot meal--adding all that water into everything in one pot, letting it presoak for an hour, then cooking until warm/rehydrated.

The good news is that a presoak works incredibly well on the pasta--it slurped the water right up. The bad news is that it slurped the water right up--the pasta gets waterlogged long before the sauce gets reconstituted. Still tasted okay.

So it seems the way to do it is to presoak the pasta separately (maybe in its bag), presoak the sauce and meat in the pot, bring the sauce and meat up to temperature and let it sit in the cozy for a bit, then add in the pasta and squirt in a little more heat to finish the job.

Here is what I would do. Dehydrate the spaghetti sauce mixture and start reconstituting it early in a pot of water. It should be the consistency of a fruit leather so break it up into smaller pieces and let it sit in water for 30-45 minutes before starting the pasta.

Bring a dried pasta and cook it in boiling water to almost el dente before removing it from the stove. Once you remove the pasta leave it in its warm water covered and place the sauce on the stove and warm it up. One the sauce is warmed-not necessarily boiling remove most of the water from the pasta and pour the sauce into the pasta and little water and heat a little further before serving.