7 Apps That Can Teach You How to Cook Like a Pro

For the most green of cooking novices, getting started in the kitchen for the first time can be an intimidating hurdle to cross. After all, with countless culinary tasks to master it can be hard to figure out where to start—and what resources to use throughout the learning process.

Luckily, in the age of smartphones and tablets it’s easier than ever to start to build up a roster of basic cooking skills without ever having to leave the comfort of your home. These helpful apps will help you easily navigate the world of the kitchen and set you on a path to being a casual culinary pro in no time.

Created by chef Daniel Holzman of The Meatball Shop, this extremely useful free app calls itself the “cookbook of the future,” providing tons of tips, recipes, and how-to videos ranging from 5 to 50 minutes that will teach you a number of kitchen skills, covering the most basic to the more complex. Holzman hosts entertaining in-app classes that will keep you engaged while also providing you valuable cooking know-how.

Produced by New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman, this app, which takes its name from Bittman’s best-selling book, contains hundreds of how-to illustrations, thousands of recipes, self-guided classes, and an index of various specific cooking skills, from “Grinding Meat” to “Preparing Chiles.” Some of the fundamental classes that have been available include “Cooking in a Nutshell” and “Love Your Skillet,” which are aimed towards true novices that need a solid jumping off point. Though this app comes with a price tag, it’s a great fully immersive guide for getting started in the kitchen.

This app, which integrates how-to videos into easy-to-follow, step-by-step recipes is built for home cooks of all experience levels, from novices just getting started to more advanced gourmands who hope to sharpen their existing skills. With over 4,000 recipes and a rotating selection of tips and techniques, this platform is a great place to get started. Another huge bonus is the hands-free setting with voice instruction, which allows you to communicate with the app even if your hands are covered in ingredients at the moment.

With this social media app, cooks can exchange recipes with friends, family, and total strangers—and store all of those recipes in one easy-to-navigate database. Upload photos of your completed dishes to inspire others, join a group chat to swap tips and tricks, and start building up a community of supportive fellow cooks that can help support you on your kitchen journey.

This shopping list app draws directly from the cooking sites that you frequent most to curate a smart shopping list that reflects recipes you’re interested in trying out. A “smart cooking sidekick,” Yummly will recommend recipes based on dishes you’ve viewed in the past and instantly add all of the necessary ingredients to your list based on the recipes you plan to make today, tomorrow, and in the future.

This clean and clear app provides HD videos and step-by-step photos that will teach you how to prepare both basic and slightly more complicated recipes. And, with a focus on world-wide cuisine, this app will help you discover dishes you may have never heard of or tried before, and give you some fundamental tips and tricks for pulling them off.

While this handy tool isn’t designated as a cooking app, it will save you tons of time and stress by helping you convert basic measurements in no time at all. This simple unit converter can aid you in changing grams to ounces, teaspoons to cups, and so on, so that you can spend less time in the kitchen stressing over complicated math, and more time cooking the dishes you love.