A few weeks ago McCauley Williams of Blue Note drank his whiskey on Sound Bites and managed to get through the 30 minutes without causing producer Natalie Van Gundy unnecessary edits.

This week we gave Eric Barnes a little sugar and it took her a full morning to edit him.

Full disclosure: It was really more than a little. Back in July, Barnes, Chris Herrington and I combined Sound Bites with The Sidebar for an hour of talking about a few things, and one of the rabbit holes we went down was Kit Kats. We decided, maybe on air, maybe off, that we’d be back and do a candy tasting before Halloween.

True to our word, here’s the proof. It turns out there are about 300 varieties of Kit Kats in Japan, where the candy is wildly popular. My grandkids are big fans and while I stand firm on Team Butterfinger, I see the appeal of a regular ol’ Kit Kat. I didn’t know how much I would like the pudding flavor — though I probably would’ve guessed how much I’d dislike the pumpkin pie.

The. Worst.

In all, we tried 19 varieties of KitKat bars, picked up at Cordova Farmers Market, Viet Hoa and grocery stores around town. We had KitKat ice cream in the freezer, but we were too worried about Eric on sugar to pull that out. Another day.

I made a promise on the podcast to share the recipe for the lemon bars with olive oil my friend Peggy Burch makes. It’s a recipe developed by Melissa Clark for The New York Times, who is in my opinion the best in the business. I always make her recipes as written, at least the first time, and they never fail.

Back to KitKats: It should come as no surprise that we found the American versions of the candy bar to be sweeter than the Japanese ones. But something of interest that’s not on the podcast is that while over the rest of the world the candy bar is made by Nestle, in the U.S., Hershey holds the license.