I always metered my hand and stopped down one to two stops.
Now I use an incident light meter that measures the amount of light that reaches my meter instead of a reflected light reading of my camera.
You can also shoot in auto and use the exposure compensation. Start shooting and adjust and look at the results until you find the exposure you like.
You can also go manual and do the same thing, with digital you don't have to wait to see the result like with film, shoot in manual and keep shooting and chimping until you get the result you like.

You are on the right track except for the use of the shadow and highlight sliders.

Without those sliders the contrast throughout the image is fairly even in the brightest and darkest parts of the image. The problem is that the DR of the scene might push the shadows into the black range.

What happens if you push a little bit too hard (expose beyond the right) and you have to recover some highlights? The highlight slider brings the brightness of the highlights from beyond the 255 JPEG limit down to 255. It also lowers the values that were already at 255 to a lower value. Everything has to get pushed down. But the effect on the mid-tones is much less and there is hardly any change to the shadows. The effect is disproportionate - the highlight contrast gets reduced.

If you want to hang onto the highlight contrast you are better off moving the Exposure slider to the left until the highlight warnings in your editor go away. Of course, this makes the shadows darker but then you can use the shadow slider to brighten them up.

The effect of the shadow slider looks different. The shadows that initially looked like a mass of black get pulled up to where we can see some tonality and color. Exposing to the right reduces the need to do a lot of shadow recovery.

So while we might think that exposing beyond the right (to the point that the JPEG highlights are blown out) is providing more dynamic range, it's not doing the highlights any good if our remedy is to maximize the highlight recovery with the highlight slider.

But the most important thing to keep in mind is that, if you want to use the camera's entire available dynamic range, you need to be exposing at the lowest practical ISO - base ISO if possible.

It depends on the subject matter. Here is a better example from my own experience.

This image was taken at Sunny 16 - ISO 400 1/800 @ f/11 = LV 14.67. RawDigger (first screen shot) shows that the raw highlights are not blown.

In the second screen shot the image on the left has no adjustment made to the exposure, highlights or anything else.

I don't have one taken with one step of additional exposure (LV 13.67) so for the image on the right I pushed the Exposure slider to the right to add one stop. Then I compensated for that by moving the Highlight slider to 68 to bring the feathers down to about the same value as the image on the left.

As you can see, the result is that the blue sky for the first image is at a luminosity close to middle gray (about 127) but much brighter in the second image (142). The net effect is that the contrast between the highlights and the mid-tones are reduced in the second image. The other consequence is that the shaded feathers under the bird are brighter in the second image.

The OP might be looking for contrast within the snow. Sunny 16 (LV 14.67) or LV 15 is likely to provide that with very little need for highlight recovery.

It depends on the subject matter. Here is a better example from my own experience.

This image was taken at Sunny 16 - ISO 400 1/800 @ f/11 = LV 14.67. RawDigger (first screen shot) shows that the raw highlights are not blown.

In the second screen shot the image on the left has no adjustment made to the exposure, highlights or anything else.

I don't have one taken with one step of additional exposure (LV 13.67) so for the image on the right I pushed the Exposure slider to the right to add one stop. Then I compensated for that by moving the Highlight slider to 68 to bring the feathers down to about the same value as the image on the left.

As you can see, the result is that the blue sky for the first image is at a luminosity close to middle gray (about 127) but much brighter in the second image (142). The net effect is that the contrast between the highlights and the mid-tones are reduced in the second image. The other consequence is that the shaded feathers under the bird are brighter in the second image.

The OP might be looking for contrast within the snow. Sunny 16 (LV 14.67) or LV 15 is likely to provide that with very little need for highlight recovery.