Best iPad apps for cooks

Instead of providing you with another 50,000 recipes, Paprika helps you catalog the recipes you already have. You can add recipes by hand or search for them with its built-in web browser. Found a dish you want to make but don't have the right ingredients? Paprika helps you create a grocery list in a snap.

Evernote Food is a perfect organizational app for cooks who are inspired by example. Capture, organize, and relive memorable food moments and meals with Evernote's infinitely customizable organizational system. Title your shots, note the location, add tags, and write about your experiences. Unfortunately, the sharing and cross-application functionality of Evernote Food is still lacking as it's a relatively new app, but look to the future for more improvements. Regardless, this app is worth the free download for those who are constantly finding bits of delicious foodstuff crossing their paths and want to remember a label, a time, or an entire meal.

You can't make stellar food without stellar ingredients. Learn how to select the best produce with Harvest. Search through hundreds of vegetables and fruits and learn how to tell what's freshest and ripest. While browsing your store or market's produce section, you can also look to this app to see the levels of pesticide residue on them. Once you've made your more educated pick, Harvest can also tell you how to store your produce to maximize flavor and freshness.

When Mark Bittman wrote his chart-topping cookbook, "How to Cook Everything," he meant business. Not falling short of its origins, its iPad manifestation is equally amazing and useful. Besides its huge collection of staple recipes, it also has educational tutorials on kitchen techniques. Like many other popular cooking apps, "How to Cook Everything" lets you keep notes about recipes, convert units, and generate shopping lists. A great feature that this app has that others should take heed of is its timer feature. In each recipe, there is a timer feature right in the instructions. For example, if a recipe calls for you to bake something for 45 minutes, you'll see an option to create a timer for 45 minutes. Create several timers as you read through the recipe to keep yourself on time. If you're not willing to pay $9.99 for this app, you can get "How to Cook Everything Essentials" (iPhone only) for free.

This app has a lot of recipes and grocery lists, but BigOven has an "use up leftover" feature that makes it stand out from the pack. With this feature, you can enter the ingredients or leftovers you have on hand to see what recipes you can make with them. Find a recipe you like or just want to remember what you've made already? BigOven can do that for you too. Organize your recipe browsing by things you want to try soon, things you've made, and things you've posted yourself.

Epicurious is a free, universal app filled with over 30,000 recipes. The app is regularly updated with more recipes and bug fixes so you're never left in a culinary rut. The app also includes a shopping list feature which syncs with your iPhone. Furthermore, Epicurious' huge database of recipes allows for the pickiest eaters and strictest diets to find the perfect dish to suit your needs.

Appetites doesn't have thousands of recipes for you to choose from. Its $4.99 buy-in is unappealing too, but it's a worthy buy if you're a beginner cook that wants to learn visually. All of the recipes in this app come from food bloggers or celebrity chefs, making their selection of recipes suitable for many tastes. The star feature of Appetites is its approach to instructions. First off, purchasers receive video instructions for everything. The kicker is these videos are all shot from the pont of view of the cook. This way, you will see exactly what's happening on the counter, instead of forcing you to squint and guess at what's going on. As of now, the initial price you pay includes a Starter Pack of 30 video recipes. After that, additional recipes cost extra.

Yes, $49.99 is a hefty price tag for an app. However, this app isn't a cooking app—it's a chef app. The eponymous book that this app comes from a book was designed as a learning tool for chefs-in-training. With the release of an iPad version, the Culinary Institute of America allows amateur cooks to have a peek and a chance to measure up to the pros. Unlike other cooking apps that simply catalog a bunch of recipes, The Professional Chef is laid out like a proper book. Flip through chapters, highlight, jot notes, and take quizzes (yes, quizzes). The app is full of videos, incredibly informative reading material, and ways to really push your culinary skills. If you need another reason to get this app: food porn.

When you're cooking at home, you are in the best position to eat simpler and healthier. Dip into the raw food world with Matthew Kenney's app. His recipes are great for those with dietary restrictions or are just looking for healthy food they can take on the go. Even if you're a diehard carnivore or just have an aversion to raw textures, look to this app for food inspiration. For instance, instead of making pasta dishes with your standard noodle, Kenney suggest creating noodles out of raw carrots.

This app is worth downloading even if you don't have dietary restrictions. It's nice to mix it up every once in a while with recipes that come from a different perspective on food. Even better, if you're cooking for lots of people, it's always a good idea to have a dish or dessert that all of your guests can eat, regardless of respective dietary restrictions. If you are vegan, this app has tons of delicious vegan recipes from entreés to desserts.

As a chef, it's important to know your cuts of meat. Unfortunately, this app only focuses on cuts of beef, but the information it provides is still useful and priceless. With this app, you'll always know what cut of meat you're looking for and the ideal way to cook it for maximum flavor. The app may not be as pristine as the others in this AppList as far as looks go, but it's still worth the price!

Martha Stewart brings her unique talents to the iPad in Martha Stewart Makes Cookies. This app features a unique interface that allows you to discover and create the best cookies around. It features instructional videos, baking tips, packaging ideas, timers, shopping lists, recipe sharing options, and many more items that will have you turning to Martha any time you are in need of a holiday treat.

Grocery iQ is by far the most feature rich an intuitive grocery list app out there. Scan items from your home to add to your favorites for future list-making, clip coupons in-app, and plan out your store visit by aisle. Using this app was pretty addictive. I may have to ditch my scrunched up stickies in favor of this app when grocery shopping in the future.

A major distinction between a beginner cook and an expert one is their understanding of food and that recipes are not set in stone. Just because you've ran out of butter, it doesn't mean you're in the weeds. Substitutions are abound and Smart Chef Substitutions is here to guide you. From baking ingredients to herbs, this app organizes many substitution options for every missing ingredient.

In the kitchen, timing is everything. Start cooking something too soon, and it'll overcook. Plate a salad too early, and the greens will wilt and go soggy. Keep yourself in check with Repeat Timer. Add as many alerts and timers as you want, create repeating timers for things like basting a roast, and label them so you don't forget what you need to do.

Bad at math or just have a horrible memory for conversions? Kitchen Calculator PRO is here to save the day. Convert volumes, weights, temperatures, and measurements. Need precise measurements for a certain ingredient? Kitchen Calculator lets you enter your own measurement entry and save it for future use.