Feeling sour about sourdough

My sourdough starter continues to develop as it should, even though I converted it to whole wheat flour when I ran out of white flour. I'll be buying white flour in March. February's grocery budget is long gone. Anyway, I've tried making two sourdough recipes this week and I haven't been pleased with either one.

These are sourdough cheese rolls. I made the dough a little too soft and they spread more than they should have.


I made them into hearts for Valentine's Day. Nathan liked how they tasted.

This is sourdough whole wheat bread. It came out overdone (as you can see by the dark crust). If I make it again, I'll lower the oven temperature. Also, it rose beautifully but fell while baking.
It smelled so disgusting when I cut it open that I broke my current rule of not eating bread and ate a bite. Turns out it just smelled and tasted like sourdough. I still don't like how sourdough tastes. Nathan said it tasted fine, not necessarily a make-again recipe. He couldn't taste the sourdough. It just tasted like whole wheat bread.

I was already in jammies by the time it finished, so I didn't take any to my taste-testers. To make matters worse, I fell asleep while waiting for it to cool. When I woke up 6 hours later, the crust was a bit dried out. I don't think I'll be sharing it now. I'll just freeze most of it for croutons/bread pudding, since Nathan is still eating the last two batches of bread.