Rou Jia Mo (Chinese Hamburger)

Rou jia mo ('meat sandwiched in bread') is a Shaanxi street-food classic with a lineage traceable to the Zhou dynasty by some accounts — flatbread and stewed meat being an unremarkable pairing in any cuisine, though the specific combination and method is Shaanxi's. The phrase is grammatically inverted in Mandarin: the mo (bread) is named last despite being the structural element.

The pork version, the baseline Shaanxi form, uses pork belly and shoulder slow-stewed for hours in a master-broth (lu tang) seasoned with star anise, cinnamon, cloves, Sichuan pepper, fennel and dried chilli. The pork is cooked until the connective tissue has dissolved and the fat is unctuous; it is then removed, chopped roughly on a board, and stuffed into a baked flatbread that has been split along one side.

The bread (mo) is a small, flat, slightly dense wheat round baked in a clay oven or dry-fried in a pan until crisp outside and slightly doughy within — it needs to hold the very moist meat filling without collapsing. The combination of the dry, bready exterior and the slow-cooked juicy pork is the defining texture.

Halal versions use beef or lamb stewed with cumin — a northwest Muslim adaptation that is the dominant form in Xi'an's Muslim Quarter. These are substantively different in flavour from the pork version: the cumin-lamb version is arguably the more complex.

The dish has spread nationally through chain restaurants and food-court stalls. The original Shaanxi versions, eaten standing at a cart in Xi'an's morning market, remain the reference point.