In Italian cuisine, garlic is put un chopped if not cut in small pieces. I personally doubt it could give a lot of taste during a short Sautee.
Is that correct and what are the actual differences of adding garlic in different conditions like chopped fine or with or without peeling?
Best Answer
The more chopped-up you chop the garlic, the faster the garlic will return flavor when cooking it, but also the faster it loses its flavor.
At my household, we don't really use garlic whole; we either chop them up into a mince, finely chopped or roughly chopped.
We use minced garlic for raw consumption, in soy sauce based dips.
We use finely chopped garlic to flash flavor the oil we use to stir-fry in; first heat up the oil, dump in the finely-chopped garlic, use a spatula to shuffle the garlic around a little, and put in the stir-fry ingredients.
We use roughly-chopped garlic to flash flavor the oil we use to stir-fry in, while having it serve as a vegetable of the dish.
We use whole garlic cloves baked, to compliment baked dishes. And also for brines that take days to finish brining.
Of course, the way we use garlic in my household may be not-optimal, or what I listed above may seem random, but there's how we use garlic for ya :)