How should I drain a capacitor in a rectifier circuit?
I think you are on the right track, and you want a bleeder resistor. The discharge time is approximated by 5CR which in your case is rather long : 4400u x 35k x 5 = 770s. There is a trade off here between fast enough discharge and power dissipation. I would suggest about 1k/1W which gives 22s, reasonable, and power dissipation of somewhere less than 0.5W, which is fine for your experiment I think.