Tip 3. Line your pie shell for easy pie weight removal.
While pie weights are essential for parbaking the perfect pie crust, making sure you can remove the weights is just as important. To easily remove pie weights, you have to line the pie shell, and here the debate begins. Recipes variously call for wax paper, foil, or parchment paper. When we checked with Reynolds, one of the biggest manufacturers of waxed paper, they said it should never be directly exposed to the heat of the oven. Foil and its high conductivity helped to efficiently transmit the oven’s heat to the shell as it baked, but it also trapped steam on its underside which resulted in spotty browning. Parchment paper is the best option. With its more permeable structure, parchment paper allows the shell to breath, and then brown, as it bakes. Allow enough overlap so that you can safely and easily grasp the edge and lift the pie weights, as once the shell is parbaked, those weights will be very hot.
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