Forced to do Internet Recovery?

[serious.person]

I just bought a brand new 1TB SSD for my late 2012 Mac mini, and I want a clean install of it with Mojave after I replace my old drive. Should I reformat the SSD to journaled using an external adaptor first? Asking this because this is not the first time I upgrading drive for Mac, the system always unable to detect my drive and went straight to internet recovery mode, even I already plugged in my Mojave boot drive via USB. Forcing me to install the legacy OSX. I want a clean install of my new SSD with Mojave. Pressing and holding Option or command R doesn't boot the macOS utility.

 

[chrfr]

I just bought a brand new 1TB SSD for my late 2012 Mac mini, and I want a clean install of it with Mojave after I replace my old drive. Should I reformat the SSD to journaled using an external adaptor first? Asking this because this is not the first time I upgrading drive for Mac, the system always unable to detect my drive and went straight to internet recovery mode, even I already plugged in my Mojave boot drive via USB. Forcing me to install the legacy OSX. I want a clean install of my new SSD with Mojave. Pressing and holding Option or command R doesn't boot the macOS utility.

If you've ever installed 10.12.4 or later on that Mini, when you do internet recovery (Command-option-shift-r), you'll get 10.14.1.
The reason you've only been able to use internet recovery is because you replaced the disk which had the recovery partition on it. New disks don't have that partition.
You can also make a bootable USB installer of Mojave before you replace the disk. You'll need a USB disk that's at least 8GB. https://www.imore.com/how-create-bootable-installer-mac-operating-system

 

[CoastalOR]

Should I reformat the SSD to journaled using an external adaptor first?

You can use an adaptor to format the SSD if you have one available. The formatting can also be done once you get internet recovery running with the Disk Utility.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204904