Rose Levy Beranbaum knows from baking. The author of the million-copies-sold The Cake Bible spends most days thinking about what to do with flour, butter and sugar. That task became even more satisfying about eight years ago when she discovered a fleet of organic and unrefined sugars that have distinct flavors. "Sugar is no longer just a sweetener," she says of this new class of specialty sugars from exotic locales like Costa Rica and Paraguay. "It's now a flavoring ingredient that brings a whole new spectrum to the artist's palette of taste."
Recently, these sugars have made their way onto the...