These pie weights have worked well for me when I want to bake a pie shell empty and then fill it. I put parchment paper over the unbaked crust and add the weights. I bake for 10 minutes and then remove the parchment and weights. I turn the oven off and put the pie crust in while it cools. It is just hot enough to finish baking the unfilled shell. Then I finish the pie, using edged guards if it requires any additional baking of the filling.

These are great for use in sous vide cooking (Haven't tried them for pie). I fill a snack size Ziploc bag with as many as I need to weigh down the vacuum bag so it doesn't float during a cook. Just place the sealed snack bag in the bottom of your vacuum bag before adding the meat and proceed as usual. Have used them 3 times and they work like a charm. They come with a mesh bag which is nice for when you want to wash them, you can just hang and air dry.

Someone had written that they were hard to clean after use. But I found that lining the crust with aluminum before laying down the weights makes for easy clean-up. They don't keep the sides from shrinking. So that is a disadvantage.

This package holds just a pound of weights, which worked in a standard 9" pie plate, but for anything bigger you may want to buy 2 packages to keep the sides from collapsing. There is no way there's enough for two pies shells as the description indicates. When not in use I store these in a labeled 1 pint mason jar because the clam-shell package they come in is not going to work for long. They arrived quickly, and they do the job they're intended to do, but I deducted two stars for the inaccurate description; the package does not weigh 1 1/4 lbs, nor is there enough for two pie shells.

I was told by multiple bloggers that I HAD to have pie weights, and that they had to be these little ceramic balls. After reading other reviews, I decided to purchase 1lb, and am happy I did. There were way too many balls, but the other amounts available would have been far too few. It really did help my pie crust out greatly--more so than I even anticipated. BUT I ended up having to throw out 20% of the balls I used because they tried to take some of the pie home with them, and no amount of soaking and scrubbing could get the excess dough off. They're small so it is a huge pain in the tookus to clean them when this happens. I guess it's good that I don't bake pies that often, and that I got far too many, but I would probably recommend to others that they get either the metal chain or silicon platform version of a pie weight instead of this.