In today’s age, there is an app for almost everything—and cooking is not excluded! Ranging from gourmet recipes to calorie-counting tools, there are hundreds of food-related apps available that will inspire you and help you to prepare food effortlessly.

We looked up 6 apps to help improve your cooking.

 1. Jamie Oliver’s 20-min meals

The renowned British chef, Jamie Oliver, doesn’t disappoint with his latest app, Jamie Oliver’s 20-min meals. Based on his best selling cookbook, this handy app gives you excellent recipes while helping you to prepare the food with its comprehensive step-by-step guide. Each recipe includes detailed pictures to demonstrate each step, making it almost impossible to go wrong—even for beginners.

The app is very user friendly and gives you lists of ingredients according to whether you are cooking for two or four people. Sadly this terrific app isn’t free and costs $7.99, however with the quality of recipes and the ease-of-use offered, this app will surely improve your cooking.

2. Mario Batali Cooks

Cooking Italian has never been easier! The famous Italian chef, Mario Batali, has a useful app available that gives you delicious and easy Italian recipes—for only $4.99! Besides the gourmet recipes, Mario Batali Cooks is a very trendy, fun and easy to use app since it comes with a neat step-by-step guide and photos as well as videos. As a nice bonus, the app includes quite a lot of information on wine, particularly pairing your meal with the right wine. With all the great features, it made the list of Best New iPhone apps of 2010.

3. Calorie Counter & Fitness Tracker by MyFitnessPal

For anyone who is slightly calorie-conscious when cooking, this app is a must-have. As a compact calorie-counter on your smartphone, the app by MyFitnessPal has been very successful in helping people to limit their everyday calorie intake. The app prides itself on having one of the largest food databases and even comes with a barcode scanner, which is excellent for estimating calories in products and ingredients.

Furthermore, the app allows you to enter your calorie-intake and amount of exercise to help you control your diet. The goal-tracker feature is also easy to use and allows you to save all your personalised data on the MyFitnessPal online database.

4. How To Cook Everything

As the name of the app suggests, How to Cook Everything is a fantastic app to help you out in the kitchen—even if you are a novice cook. At $4,99, the app includes 2000 recipes from Mark Bittman’s book, which shares its name with the app. Great features of this recipe-app are that it includes a built in cooking timer and even a shopping list feature.

Each recipe has very detailed instructions that will ensure that you don’t go wrong anywhere. General tips are available like how to perfectly roast meat and even how to sharpen knives.

5. Recipes by Ingredients

One of the handiest apps around for anyone who cooks is definitely the Recipes by Ingredients app. With over 175000 recipes, this app allows you to search recipes according to the ingredients that you already have in your fridge! As a bonus, the app is also allergy-conscious and categorizes recipes according to any potential food-allergies.

Likewise, the app measures calories and of course gives accurate preparation and cooking times. The recipes are all designed to help you make a quick and delicious meal without any hassles. You can add and save your own recipes to the app and it’s a nice bonus that the app is free on iPad and iPhone.

6. Simply Organic Recipes

If you are fond of organic food, the Simply Organic app is a terrific free app that is simple to use and of course gives you healthy cooking options. Naturally the app has lots of recipes to browse through and all the recipes are logically categorized to help you find exactly what you are looking for. Users are able to rate recipes, which makes it even easier to choose a popular meal.

The app has a “random recipe generator” that is a nice touch to mix up your recipe choices. A great feature is also that each recipe shows the nutritional information per serving.

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Image courtesy of MyBlogGuest

Maddison Grehan is tech-lover and media student at The University of Sydney. Although she is on a tight budget, she can keep up with the latest technology thanks to Flexirent.