In Springfield, Vt. in the 40's (and I believe continuing some decades
afterward) there were two Polish bakeries that made superb bread: a
light sour rye and a dark sour rye, very elastic crumb, sour, well
developed flavor.

I'm going to try to come as close to it as I can with a bread machine.
I'm not a completely inexperienced baker, and I am now sure that the
only ingredients were flour, water, salt and starter. The bread I
have had that is most like it was wheat bread, pain levain, from
bakeries in Herault, France. So it was more the method than the grain
used that produced the quality I want.

The ingredients I plan to use are rye flour, bread flour, gluten,
starter, salt, and water.

If anyone has ideas on how to do this in a bread machine, I'll be
grateful. I'm sure that kneading it sufficiently is important in
order to get the elastic crumb -- so, according to messages on this
newsgroup, I would have to stop the machine and knead it more than
once. Thoughts on total kneading time? Is it possible to overknead
it?

Tekla