When Sophie Sadler moved from Germany to the United States, she found herself missing one thing above all else: authentic German food.
But when she looked up recipes online, they didn’t seem quite right. Or they called for ingredients that were hard to find in the States.
So Sophie took it upon herself to create those hard-to-find German recipes. Substituting ingredients that you could easily find in US grocery stores, Sophie developed recipes that brought her back to life in Germany.
“I decided I should just share these recipes online because that would also hold me accountable to continue baking and cooking German food,” says Sophie. “Then once I started sharing these recipes on Dirndl Kitchen, I got such great feedback from readers and home cooks that were sharing their stories of how my food helped them feel closer to Germany.”
Of course, Sophie had a story of her own.
"The person in my life that cooked authentic German food and inspired all this was my grandma, Oma Sieghile,” says Sophie. “And so whenever I had a question about a certain cake or a certain traditional German food, I would call up my grandma and ask her.”
Sophie's grandmother passed away just three months after she launched her blog. Whenever she struggles with a recipe, she thinks of what her grandmother might have done. And in her grandmother’s memory, she sees the blog as a way to preserve her culinary legacy through the many delicious dishes she made.
Despite this emotional motivation, running a blog while working a full-time job wasn’t easy for Sophie — and there were times when she thought it all might be too much.
“I was working full-time at different places in finance, marketing, startups, all over the place — I tried so many different things,” says Sophie. “But honestly, I always had that itch to become self-employed.”
Forced to choose between sticking to a full-time job or taking her blog to the next level, she chose the blog — but it would require some savviness when it came to monetization.
