Ròu Shāobing (肉烧饼) is the meat-filled sesame flatbread, ground pork or beef sealed inside the dough before it bakes rather than tucked into a cut bread afterward. The angle is that this is a baked-in sandwich, not an assembled one: the filling and the shell cook together as one piece, so the bread has to set without the meat juices either escaping or steaming it soft. Get it right and you bite through a crisp sesame crust into a hot, savory pocket with no seam to leak. Get it wrong and the meat either bakes dry inside a thick bread wall or weeps fat that turns the bottom soggy.
The build is enclosed and layered. A wheat dough, often laminated with a thin oil-and-flour paste so it bakes in flaky sheets, is rolled out, portioned with seasoned ground meat, then gathered and pinched shut so the filling is fully sealed. The parcel is flattened gently, the top brushed and pressed into a bed of sesame seeds, and the whole thing baked, traditionally against the wall of a hot clay oven or on a griddle finished under cover, until the crust colors and crisps and the interior steam cooks the meat through. The seasoning in the filling is the work: scallion, ginger, a little soy and spice, sometimes a touch of stock or rendered fat so the meat stays moist as it sets. Done well the shāobing comes out with a shatter-crisp sesame shell, layered tender bread just inside it, and a meat core that is juicy, well seasoned, and bound to the bread rather than rattling loose in a cavity. Done poorly the failure modes are specific: under-baked, the dough around the meat stays gummy and the parcel collapses; over-stuffed or badly pinched, the seam splits and fat runs out onto the oven; a too-thick wrapper bakes into a heavy bread plug with a small dry knot of meat lost in the middle.
It shifts by filling and by region. Pork is the common core, beef and lamb appear where local taste runs that way, and the spicing slides from gently aromatic to frankly cumin-and-chili forward. Some versions are nearly all bread with a thin meat layer, others are packed close to a pie. The plain layered sesame shāobing, the egg-stuffed and pork-tenderloin variants where filling is added to a split baked bread, and the sweet sugar-filled forms are each their own preparation and deserve their own article rather than being folded in here. What holds ròu shāobing together as a category is the baked-in build: meat and sesame crust set together in one piece, sealed, crisp outside, hot within.