Must Have Apps to Turn You into a Professional Chef

I love watching cooking shows like Master Chef and Top Chef, but it seems that every time that I step into the kitchen to try my own hand at cooking, a pot starts to boil over or the smoke alarm goes off.

I may love food, but I am no natural born cook. I suffer from disaster after disaster when I cook on my own, but with a decent set of instructions and the aid of my handy electronics, I can occasionally churn out an edible meal. If you're like me, and need some serious assistance to whip up tasty meals, take a look at these iPad apps that will turn even the most hopeless cook into a professional chef – if only for one meal.

Pepper Plate (Free) – Half of the battle when cooking is to make sure that you have all of the ingredients and tools that you need for the perfect meal. That coq au vin won't turn out well without the right type of wine, and chicken cordon bleu with the wrong cheese would be a disaster. With Pepper Plate, you can manage recipes, menus and shopping lists so that you've always got every ingredient you need right at your finger tips. With this app you can put together one meal or twenty meals, and prepare food for yourself or for an entire dinner party. Pepper Plate does it all.

Paprika Recipe Manager ($4.99) – Do you have a collection of recipes that you would like to try some day? If you want to keep track of delicious recipes that you've gathered from books, friends, and the web, Paprika is the way to do it. Organization is the key to being a great cook, so keep your recipes in order with this app that supports more than 190 different recipe sites. You can scale recipes for desired serving sizes, create detailed grocery lists, and plan out meals all within this fantastic recipe saving app.

Appetites ($2.99) – I'm a dunce when it comes to the kitchen. I don't know how to knead dough properly or whip milk into cream, so an app like Appetites, which has step-by-step video instructions, is the perfect solution. Appetites comes equipped with more than 30 step-by-step video recipes for a variety of tricky dishes, but because you have a video guide, your entrees turn out perfectly every single time. Complex techniques are broken down into bite sized videos, turning you into a master chef before you know it.

Timer+ (Free) – Timing is important, whether you're cooking a steak or a souffl . Timer+ is a simple, easy to use countdown timer that can run multiple timers from a list of presets. You can set timers down to the second, pause and resume. You can set up a timer for each thing that you're cooking, so everything you whip up will come out absolutely perfect. This app is even able to run in the background so you can do other things while you wait for the timer to count down.