Antonella Scatigna opens the door of her little taverna in Locorotondo and shows us to a table, one of six. An elderly gentleman seated near by is spooning grated parmesan on to a bowl of chunky vegetable soup and tearing hungrily at the crusty corn bread.

In between mouthfuls he strikes up a conversation with Scatigna, shouting over the clatter of copper pans as she retreats to her kitchen.

Taverna Al Duca is the kind of place I dreamt about before coming to Puglia. Forget your fancy Michelin-starred establishments, I was in search of something more rustic, where the chef is your waiter and the produce speaks for itself. And I was after vegetables — lots of them.

I’m no vegetarian — far from it. I check out the thighs of spring lambs imagining them roasted with slivers of sweet new season’s garlic. But meat and fish make up just 30 per cent of my diet; the rest is vegetables.

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I had already heard about Puglia’s vegetable cooking from a friend. She raves about the big bowls of fava bean purée, eaten with steamed wild chicory, drizzled with the region’s extra-virgin olive oil; she goes all misty-eyed at the thought of orecchiette (“little ears”) pasta with a sauce of turnip tops, garlic, anchovies and hot peperoncino; and she dreams daily of the countless vegetable stews.

Don’t get her started on Pugliese dairy products: her first encounter with burrata (a creamier mozzarella) bordered on the indecent.

We had to go to taste all this, and I found the place. Earlier this year I stopped by La Dolce Vita, the annual London-based Olympia event that showcases all things Italian, from property to wine and cookery demonstrations.

There I met Vittorio Muolo, owner of Masseria Torre Coccaro, near Fasano, a 45-minute drive south of Bari. He converted the abandoned 16th-century masseria a few years ago and set about creating something new for Puglia: smart rooms and a leading chef who plunders the restored six-acre kitchen garden for his menu. (There is also an Aveda spa and a lagoon-like pool.)

Muolo buys fish every day for the hotel restaurant from the nearby port, and thinks nothing of driving two hours to buy capocollo, a speciality sausage from a butcher in Martina Franca. He quivers visibly when he urges you to try the town’s flagship tart, the crisp, buttery, almond and cherry-filled bocconotto. This was the ideal place to stay, all right.

Our room looked out over Coccaro’s cookery school and olive groves stretching into the misty distance, the shoreline just visible beyond. Each morning you could hear excited chatter drifting out of the double doors on to the cobbled courtyard as guests attempted to master the chef Donato Varella’s homemade pasta dishes.

We signed up for a class on our first morning and just about managed to master the orecchiette (though my ears looked more like oars).

We also encountered our first barattiere, a Puglian vegetable that tastes and looks like a cross between a cucumber and a melon. This was chopped up and added to a cialda, a soupy, refreshing salad made with tomatoes, olives and bread.

I was intrigued by the barattiere — it’s not often you come across a vegetable or fruit in Europe that you’ve never heard of before. It had been picked that morning by Coccaro’s gardener, Todi Tagani. “Depending on the time of the year, it can taste more melony or more like cucumber,” he explains.

Puglia has had many conquerors, from the Romans and Greeks to the Spanish and French — even the Turks made sorties along the coasts. So the architecture is as rich as the cuisine. Buildings range from the Hobbit-like trulli — stone dwellings capped by corbel-vaulted stone roofs — to the Baroque fantasies of Lecce and Martina Franca.

But for all the richness of its history, this has always been a land of poverty and emigration. Thousands left to make a new life in the US early last century.

So what is cucina povera, exactly? It’s pasta made without eggs; bread made from hard-grain, locally grown durum wheat flour; and a diet based mainly on vegetables, many of them wild, such as chicory and lampascione, the bulb of wild tassel hyacinth — foods foraged from stony fields and crumbling terraces. Michelin stars don’t work down here: this is home cooking, where women chefs rule.

The best we encountered was at Cucina Casareccia or Le Zie (The Aunts) in Lecce, where Concetta Cantoro and her sisters serve up glorious Puglia-style comfort food in what appears to be their front room.

Old photos and bright canvases painted by local artists jostle for space on the uneven walls; plastic flowers sit on each paper-cloth-covered table.

We started with pittule — savoury fritters made with capers and chopped black olives — then followed with ciceri e tria — homemade pasta with chick peas — and then fell off the vegetable wagon for the aunts’ veal meatballs stuffed with cheese and braised in white wine.

Pugliese cuisine is based on olive oil (the region produces 48 per cent of Italy’s extra-virgin olive oil). Stale bread is cut into cubes or breadcrumbs and pan-fried in olive oil to make a garnish for pasta and vegetable dishes. One of the best examples I had was at Osteria del Tempo Perso in Ostuni, which is famed for its 15-dish antipasti.

We had seen Ostuni in the distance a couple of times. It looks like a glittering ocean liner beached on the shore, especially at night. There is nothing to do here except wander the maze of narrow, bleached white streets, taking shelter from the sun in one of the better trattorias.

Head down a series of centuries-worn steps and you’ll eventually come across it. The dining room is cut into the hillside, a chandelier clinging precariously to the cave ceiling.

I ate burrata scattered with pomegranate seeds; a delicate courgette and cheese custard on a fine chickpea purée; artichokes stuffed with ricotta — and strascinati (bigger orecchiette) with a sauce of sprouting broccoli, chillies and anchovy fillets dressed with crunchy breadcrumbs fried in olive oil. To drink, we had a primitivo di manduria from the Feudi di San Marzano winery.

We drank a lot of primitivo. Puglia’s wine industry is thriving, with old wineries cleaning up their act and young guns making a name for themselves with the region’s grape varieties.

Quality wine from Puglia is becoming increasingly available in the UK, so I knew I wouldn’t have to lug back any bottles, but I would make room for a sack of tomatoes if I could.

Puglia’s tomatoes are sweet and acid, bursting with juice. They are available year round, fresh from the market, sun-dried and packed in olive oil, or strung into brilliant red clusters that, if hung in cool, dry place, will keep juicy well into the next spring.

Every day there was something on the menu cooked up from the garden — grilled vegetables that you dress yourself with olive oil and freshly squeezed lemon juice, or pan-fried king oyster mushrooms that are celebrated with a festival each October.

Feeling smug that we had ended up in the right place, we tried out another smart hotel near by — Puglia’s poshest, in fact — the San Domenico.

Yes, there was Relais & Châteaux frou-frou in all the rooms, but the restaurant, happily, was refreshingly rustic, and the scene of the best stuffed aubergine dish I’ve yet eaten. All of Puglia must be like this, I figured. I can’t wait to go back to confirm that. And no, I never got bored with fava bean purée.

Need to know

Getting there Sunvil Discovery (020-8758 4722, www.sunvil.co.uk) offers a seven-night stay at the five-star Masseria Torre Coccaro from £1,264 pp (two sharing). The price includes seven nights’ accommodation with breakfast, return flights (Gatwick to Bari) and car hire. Sunvil Discovery can tailor-make itineraries throughout the Puglia region.

Eating Taverna Al Duca, Via Papatotero 3, Locorotondo (00 39 0804 313007). Cucina Casareccia, Via Costadura 19, Lecce (00 39 0832 245178) Osteria del Tempo Perso, Via Tanzarella Vitale 47, Ostuni (00 39 0831 303320)

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