You know how it is. Day of the Dead rolls around every year and there’s not a stinkbug to be found anywhere in the city. On the following Monday all your friends back home in Guerrero are heading to Taxco for Dia de Jumil, to trudge up the hill and poke under rocks and logs to collect as many jumiles as they can. It’s not just a party you’re missing. It’s been so long since you’ve popped any of the cinnamon-scented, iodine-rich critters that you can feel your thyroid swelling like a balloon.
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Cremeria La Ordeña in the West Elsdon neighborhood is not a specialist in edible insects (though in addition to stinkbugs they also carry chapulines, the lime-and-salt-seasoned toasted grasshoppers that the Oaxaqueños are nuts about). When it opened early last year it was primarily all about dairy products: Mexican cheeses and cremas, both imported and domestic. Owners Nicolas Aguado and Luciano Dominguez opened after a year of selling their stuff at the Ashland Swap-O Rama and the 7 Mile Fair flea market in Caledonia, Wisconsin, while they waited for their city permits and licenses (they still sell at those places too).
They fully expected La Ordeña, with its limited selection of products, would be a part-time sideline to their regular jobs. “We were thinking around here [the customers] would all be from Guerrero,” Aguado says. “They buy a lot of xincho cheese. When we opened we don’t know what to put in. It was the beans and the creams.”
There’s also three flavors of cajeta, the sweet, viscous goat and cow’s milk caramel, including a mildly alcoholic-tasting version with walnuts, and another cooked a little longer to impart a subtle burnt flavor.
But it’s still a lot cheaper than a stinkbug run to Taxco.
5958 S. Pulaski773-284-8300facebook.com/CremeriaLaOrdena
