Apple-peas cordial is the green heart of the Apple-Peas Highball. Granny Smith apples and raw sugar snap peas go through a juicer together, the juice is clarified with a pectic enzyme until it runs transparent, and the result is sweetened and acidified into a cordial. What comes out tastes like the smell of a vegetable garden, and it is clear enough to carbonate hard.
Ascorbic Acid Goes In First
Cut apple browns within minutes. The reaction is enzymatic — polyphenol oxidase in the fruit meeting oxygen in the air — and it does not just cost you the colour, it costs the fresh apple aroma too. A gram and a half of ascorbic acid stirred into the juice the moment it leaves the juicer preferentially takes up the oxygen and stops the reaction before it starts. Add it late and you are preserving juice that has already turned.
What Pectinex Is Doing
Fresh apple juice is cloudy because pectin — the structural polysaccharide in the fruit's cell walls — holds fine solids in suspension. Pectinex is a pectinase preparation: it cleaves those pectin chains, the suspension collapses, and the solids flocculate and drop to the bottom of the container where you can strain them off. Dose it at 0.25% of the juice weight, stir it in properly, and give it time at room temperature. You can watch it work — the line between clear juice on top and sediment below moves down the jar over an hour or two.
The reason to bother is carbonation. Every suspended particle in a liquid is a nucleation site where dissolved CO2 can come out of solution, so cloudy mixers foam violently on the pour and go flat while you watch. A clarified cordial holds its gas. It also changes the texture on the palate from something that reads as juice to something that reads as a drink.
Sugar, Then Both Acids
For every 300 ml of clarified juice: 24 grams of sugar, 1.8 grams of citric acid, 0.9 grams of malic acid. The sugar load is deliberately low — this is a cordial for a highball, not a syrup, and it is going into the glass five ounces at a time. The two acids are not interchangeable. Malic is the acid apples actually contain, and it tastes rounder and slower; citric is sharper and hits earlier. Two parts citric to one part malic gives a bright front edge over an apple-shaped body, which is what clarification strips out and what you are putting back.
It Does Not Keep
A week, refrigerated, and that is generous. There is not enough sugar here to preserve anything and the acids only take the pH so far, so treat it as fresh produce rather than as a bottled syrup. Make it the day you want it if you can. If the colour starts drifting from pale green toward amber, the ascorbic acid has been used up and the aroma is going with it.