Use a light hand and taste as you go when stirring it into salad dressings, rubs, marinades, sauces and stews. The strong flavor of garlic powers many Mexican and Tex-Mex dishes. Garlic powder makes it easy to amplify the savory warmth of taco fillings made with beef or pork and cooked tomato sauce for burritos.

Though widely used as an herb or spice, garlic is botanically a vegetable. It offers a variety of health benefits and is a particularly pungent ingredient sure to spice up your favorite dish. Unlike other vegetables, it’s less commonly cooked on its own or eaten whole.

Garlic powder is made from garlic cloves that have been dehydrated and ground into fine particles. The flavor is garlicky but vastly different than fresh-chopped garlic. It tastes sweeter and much less assertive than fresh garlic, but also without the caramelly undertones that you get from roasted or sautéd garlic.

In a supermarket, fresh garlic, ginger, shallots and onions would be in the produce department, but their dried versions would be on the spice aisle. I wouldn’t expect a farmers’ market to have dried spices. Fresh onions are definately vegetables, but onion powder and dried chopped onion are spices.

Garlic chives, an herb with a garlicky flavor, are an obvious substitute, but here are other herbs and spices you may find useful:

1. Peppercorns—white, pink, or Szechuan—can add different flavors to your cooking.
2. Cumin’s distinctive taste that may work well in some recipes, especially where garlic is used raw.

Garlic is incredibly pungent. The flavor of garlic can be described as spicy in a way, though not like chili peppers or peppercorns. It’s more that it produces such warmth that it comes across as spicy. There is also an earthiness in the flavor that’s difficult to translate—garlic is truly a unique flavor.

Garlic and onion can continue to cause bad breath for hours after a meal. As part of the digestive process, their byproducts are absorbed into the bloodstream and carried to the lungs, giving bad breath an encore.

Garlic gets its flavor from diallyl disulfide, which is a natural oil that turns bitter when exposed to the air. The finer the pieces of garlic, the more oil is released, so a whole clove can sit for longer than pressed garlic before turning bitter. Saute garlic slowly over low heat to release the flavor.

Chopping garlic releases a heady mix of chemical compounds called sulfides, said Sheryl Barringer, professor and department chair of food science and technology at The Ohio State University. These volatile molecules are what give garlic its “distinctive, pungent garlickiness,” she said.

You can put a big handful of whole garlic cloves in a small pot of soup and hardly even know there’s any garlic in it. If you want to bring out the full flavor of crushed garlic, let it set a few minutes to steep before adding it to your dish at the end of its cooking time.

“If you want strong tasting garlic, put it through a press or chop it fine so you’ll have more of the interactions,” she says. (Another hack: For extra garlickiness, let chopped garlic sit 10 minutes before cooking. This gives the chemical reaction even more time to develop flavor.)

Roasted garlic loses its heat completely which is replaced with a lovely syrupy, caramel and sweet, wonderful flavor. Next to fried, roasted garlic is my favorite whether eaten on its own, in a salad or used as a cooking ingredient. It is super easy to overcook garlic when it is fried in oil.

Although raw garlic has a stronger flavor and more pungent smell than cooked garlic, it’s safe to consume. Raw garlic also retains more allicin, which is the sulfur-containing compound responsible for many of garlic’s beneficial health effects.

Smash the garlic cloves and then finely chop. Transfer the chopped garlic into a small skillet. Add the vegetable oil. Stir-fry the garlic over Medium heat until it’s lightly golden, approximately 3-4 minutes.

When prepared in canola or olive oil, the benefits are further highlighted by the heart-healthy benefits of your chosen oil. The main benefit of fried garlic is that it is more palatable, and even enjoyable, than raw garlic.