i'd love to make fresh hamburger and hotdog buns. is it more difficult to make than standard loaf bread?
Bread is easy, ditto buns. It's also interesting. Learning to make bread is educational. It's actually fascinating. There are many forms of bread over many cultures, traditions, and of course it goes back hundreds, very likely thousands of years. Modern baking involves Saccharomyces cerevisiae, which is what you get when you buy yeast to make bread. It's the same organism used in brewing beer, etc. and fermenting wine. I've made wine, never brewed my own beer, ale etc. but many do.
I've done sourdough baking, which is also fascinating. Before they isolated specific yeast cultures people would just make a dough and let it sit and yeast organisms in the air would develop in the dough over a number of days and the dough would rise. Once you have a rising loaf, you have a starter... you can use a small portion of that dough to start the next -- they would bake the loaf they have but save a portion of it to start the next batch, which would rise faster than the last batch because they used starter to get it going. So, they'd keep some starter on hand. They'd keep it alive and kicking by occasionally adding some more flour and water. Over time this starter, if treated decently, can get more and more delicious in terms of the baked goods it will produce. That's how sourdough works. The best sourdough is made from starters cultivated and maintained, nourished and in some degree continually watched over. Anyone can do this and you can do it from scratch with great results. You can buy sourdough starters/cultures, but they aren't necessarily going to be any better than a starter you develop yourself from scratch. You could use a little yeast to get it going or you could just let it develop from naturally occurring yeast which is in the air all around us. Sourdough cultures in general produce more flavorful breads than breads made from yeast. But you have to have access to sourdough starter to make sourdough breads, thus you have to get into maintaining the starter. It's not really difficult, but you have to continue to give it some attention or your starter will go bad and bread you make from it will not taste as good as bread made from a well maintained sourdough culture.
The 49ers of the gold rush era knew about sourdough cultures, breadmaking from them. They didn't have refrigeration, but they could keep a good sourdough culture going and continue to make great bread from it. Your San Francisco sourdough tradition came out of this.