Britain is late to unearthing the joys of Georgian food, says writer and food stylist Olia Hercules. "Everybody was so busy with the Middle East, and loving that, that we haven't ripened to the Georgian thing," she states. "I'm quite surprised it took so long."

Our lack of Georgian love is set to change though, with the release of her second cookbook, Kaukasis. A follow up to 2015's Mamushka, which explored Olia's Ukrainian heritage, this new collection of recipes focuses on Caucasus - the hub of countries packed together like pickles in a jar at the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia.

For the book, Olia, 34, returned to the countries that she, her parents and elder brother meandered through on a road trip to visit family in Baku in Azerbaijan, when she was a toddler.

"We drove from the south of Ukraine, through Crimea, took a ferry to Russia and Sochi, and drove through Georgia and into Baku without even warning them. We were just like, 'Oh, shall we go to Baku?' - my parents are crazy wanderlusts - so we drove and we got there and it was amazing."

Returning as an adult, Olia retraced as much of that family trip as possible, gathering recipes and ideas along the way. She toured Georgia - travelling in "half-broken marshrutka cars; little vans that you can go to another side of Georgia in for a fiver!" - and Azerbaijan, going as far as Lankharan on the border, which is heavily influenced, both in food and culture, by its neighbour, Iran.

"We didn't go into Armenia, but I really wanted to go to Nagorno-Karabakh [a region being contested by Armenia, Azerbaijan and Karabakh leaders], where my auntie's old house is, but it's probably destroyed now by war," says Olia sadly. "It's too dangerous, they've started shooting there again. I just thought, 'I'm not going to risk it'."

Today, Olia, who trained at the famous Leiths cookery school and was a chef-de-parti at Ottolenghi, is bustling around the kitchen of her East-London flat, pickling huge, shiny unripe tomatoes, but, she says, no tomatoes can compare to the ones you get at markets in the Ukraine and Georgia. "The best tomatoes I've ever tried for sure, they're massive - the size of your head - but flavoursome, juicy, everything you need from a tomato is there."

Georgian and Azerbaijani cooking were woven into Olia's childhood, and growing up in the ex-Soviet Union, where ingredients could be really quite scarce at times. She remembers that, if you were eating out, Georgian restaurants "might be OK for food, otherwise it'd be horrible - otherwise you'd really have to go into people's homes to eat well".

Meeting home cooks is still something that fascinates Olia, who includes recipes from the people she met on her travels in Kaukasis.

"Especially in rural areas, if you go to visit someone, they will have a massive barrel of cheese that they make every morning and then they salt it, or they make buffalo butter, which is the most delicious thing I've ever tried - I could have eaten it with a spoon," she remembers.

The markets, particularly in Georgia, are as astounding as the tomatoes, too. "Your mind is blown," says Olia with a grin. "Especially those who love unusual ingredients. You can have little barberries from Tusheti, there's crazy wild plants and mushrooms I've never heard of before, and alycha plums [similar to greengages]. People use them when they're firm and green and quite sour to make this plum sauce, tkemali; a hot and sour plum ketchup."

And, if you're looking for herbs (huge fresh bundles of purple basil, tarragon and dill are used in almost everything, even refreshing fizzy drinks), the trick is to "look for an Azerbaijani lady - apparently Azerbaijanis grow the best herbs".

For Olia, a season of pop-ups and cookery sessions now awaits as the rest of us slowly come to realise just what we've been missing when it comes to Georgian and Azerbaijani food, and then, who knows?

"I can be very organised in the kitchen as a chef, but in life, I tend to..." she says, drifting off, before adding with a smile: "It's all very spontaneous."

This is a veg dish with a twist - even Olia Hercules admits: "I would never in a million years think to pair courgettes and berries."

However, this dish, which Olia first tried in a restaurant called Pheasant's Tears, run by chef Gia in Signagi - a town in the eastern region of Kakheti, Georgia - makes it work.

See for yourself...

Ingredients

(Serves 4 as a side)

4tbsp sunflower oil

4 shallots or small onions, halved

2 courgettes, cut into 2cm rounds

5 garlic cloves, cut in half vertically

2 long green chillies, bruised but left whole

Handful of fresh sour cherries and/or redcurrants

Sea salt flakes and freshly ground black pepper

To serve

Sourdough bread

Method

1 Heat the oil in a large frying pan, add the shallots or onions and cook over a medium-low heat until they soften and start turning golden. Remove from the pan.

2 Add the courgette rounds and brown on each side.

3 Reduce the heat, add the garlic and chillies and season everything really well. Cook for three minutes.

4 At the very end, add the sour cherries and/or redcurrants and switch off the heat. Taste again and season with some extra salt and pepper if it needs it.

5 Serve with sourdough bread or as part of a bigger feast.

Fancy a crunchy salad with some heat and bite?

This simple, shareable dish is one Ukrainian chef Olia Hercules discovered on her travels in Georgia. It uses tkemali, "the ubiquitous Georgian plum, garlic and wild mint condiment" - a zingy kind of ketchup - and the recipe is borrowed from a village doctor and farmer called Tina, who Olia met along the way.

And if you don't have any kohlrabi to hand, Olia says: "Do experiment with the ingredients here; I bet it would work equally well with some young sweet cabbage, robust lettuce or radicchio."

Ingredients

(Serves 4)

1tbsp pomegranate molasses

50g Tina's tkemali sauce (see below)

Honey, to taste, if needed

2 heads of chicory, sliced lengthways into 8 wedges

1 kohlrabi, peeled and thinly sliced

50g radishes, thinly sliced

25g sorrel leaves (or watercress)

Sea salt flakes

For Tina's fresh tkemali

(Makes 1.2L if not cooked down too much)

1.5kg yellow and red Alycha plums (or greengages or ordinary plums)

1/2tbsp dried mint

1/2tbsp dill seeds (or 1/2tsp fennel seeds)

1tsp ground coriander

1tsp ground blue fenugreek

5 garlic cloves, grated

1/2tsp cayenne pepper

Sea salt flakes

Freshly ground black pepper

You will also need 4 x 300ml sterilized preserving jars

Method

1 Make the tkemali: Put your yellow and red plums/greengages/plums whole into a saucepan. Add a splash of water and let them come to the boil. Cook for about 10 minutes until soft and they separate easily from their stones.

2 Leave the plums until cool enough to handle, then remove the skins and stones.

3 Mix the plum flesh with the rest of the ingredients, season to taste and cook for a further two minutes.

4 While the sauce is still hot, transfer it to the sterilized jars, seal the jars and immerse them in a deep saucepan of simmering water for a few minutes. Then store in a cool, dark place all winter or, if eating straight away, keep in the refrigerator.

5 Make the salad dressing: Mix the molasses through the tkemali, then taste, adding some salt or a little honey if you think it's too tart. It should really taste strong and pack a punch.

6 Toss the chicory, kohlrabi and radishes in a bowl, then arrange in a serving dish with the sorrel leaves (or watercress).

7 Serve with the dressing drizzled over.

Ukrainian chef and food writer Olia Hercules has borrowed this handy revision treat from her Armenian aunt Nina, who grew up in Azerbaijan.

"Just before the exams, sat at her Azerbaijani friends' table with sheets of paper covered with lines and scribbles scattered around, they had a snack," explains Olia. "No crisps in those days, but in my view they had something a lot better - cooked cauliflower florets."

Here's how you can make your own healthy something to nibble on...

Ingredients

(Serves 2 as a snack)

1tbsp olive oil

1 head of cauliflower, about 550g, divided into florets

100g unsalted butter

50g stale sourdough bread

Handful of finely chopped flat leaf parsley

1 red chilli, diced

1tsp ground sumac (optional)

Method

1 Preheat the oven to 200°C/400°F/Gas Mark 6. Brush a large baking tray with the olive oil, spread out the cauliflower florets and roast for about 30 minutes until they are cooked through and starting to colour at the edges.

2 Meanwhile, to make the brown butter, heat the butter in a frying pan and let it sizzle until it starts smelling sweet and nutty. Take the pan off the heat as soon as you smell it and it turns a deep golden colour, pour the contents into a cold bowl and set aside.

3 To make the sourdough crumbs, blitz the bread in a blender or food processor and, if necessary, spread out on a baking tray and place in the bottom of the oven for a few minutes to dry. Then mix with the parsley, chilli and sumac, if using.

4 To serve, dip the cauliflower florets first into the brown butter, then into the sourdough crumbs. Or drizzle the butter over the cauliflower along with some cooked white beans and scatter over the crumbs to make a side dish for some grilled chicken or fish.

Kaukasis by Olia Hercules, photography Elena Heatherwick, is published in hardback by Mitchell Beazley, priced £25.