I agree, I steam for hard and soft boiled eggs. Get the steamer steaming, pop the eggs in (no need to prick with this method either) and I give it 5 minutes for soft boiled and 8 minutes for hard.
For the hard eggs I then pop them into cold water for a few minutes to make them easy to handle and peel under running water while still warm. Never any problems regardless of the freshness of egg.
Add baking soda to the boiling water. The eggs will peel quite easily. Someone just taught me this and it works well!
Also, I crack the eggs thoroughly with the back of my knife, a which also makes them easily peeled!
For good reason. Even the freshest store bought eggs are old enough that it won’t make much difference how old your eggs are. If you are getting them farm fresh it can be more difficult. Still, steaming is great because it’s faster than boiling.
See food lab articles linked in my post above.
When making hard-boiled eggs, I always steam them. It seems to have no effect on how easy they are to peel. Sometimes they peel easily, but usually not.
Do you put them into the hot steam or do you put them into the cold pot and then start the steam?
You hold your breath while the eggs are boiling??? 
I use a dedicated egg steaming device. First I put the eggs and water in, then I turn on the machine. It beeps when all the water has boiled away.
I normally get mine from the local farm with a “laid on” date that is normally within the previous day or two.
I am super jealous.
Try putting a pot small pot of water on the stove and put about an inch of water into it. Slap a lid on and let it boil then gently lower the eggs straight into the water. If you don’t have a steamer basket this works just as well and you get the speed of steaming.
They are good, the sizes are all over the place but it is a small price to pay.
What I really want to find is a local supplier of bantam eggs, I love those crazy little fellas. The yolk seems to take up around 75% of the egg and I’ve never had a reliable enough supply to get the soft-boiling time right. I live in hope.
The two posts give contradictory advice – to be crystal clear, the author’s current preferred method is given in the second link. (I follow this method, the boiling version. It works! Usually.)
It’s been a while since I read them. I saved them because I really like the food lab blog and it seemed like a handy reference. Mostly I feel like reading them both gives you insight into they why, but looking back it looks like he even says in the first link that he replaced it with the second one.
in my experience, apart from the freshness of the egg (which plays a role,) the slower/more gently you hard cook them, the harder it is to peel them. worst by a long shot was using a sous vide circulator to cook them; 170 degrees for 45 minutes. huge ribbons of the white were peeling away with the shells.
Steaming advocate here, too, but my times are different. 6 for soft, 12 for hard. But I do them straight from the fridge. My method is a little different than Aspenglow’s. I put the eggs in once the water starts boiling, not before. Then I cover, reduce heat a little bit, and set the timer. It’s a fast method to boot, too, since it doesn’t take all that long to boil up a pint (if that) of water (you only need enough water that it doesn’t all completely evaporate by the end of the time.) Twelve minutes gives me perfectly hard-boiled eggs, no green or gray or around the yolk, no chalkiness. I’ve tried ten minutes, but there’s still yolk oozing at that point, so something like “medium boiled” eggs, if there’s such a thing. Do your own experiments to see what works best with your cooking vessels and eggs.
After that, they get dunked into an ice bath. I wait about 10 minutes and then peel them under running water. Now, I’m not sure what people define as “peel easily,” but I can’t remember the last time I’ve had any white stick to the shell using this method. This is not to say the shells just slip right off. Sometimes they do, but sometimes they take a little bit extra smacking the egg around to loosen the shell (and this is all from the same age batch.) But I haven’t had a white stick to the shell in I can’t remember when, and I just did a bunch of a couple dozen eggs for Easter.
I have to try that, does not work.
I pressure cook mine in an electric pressure cooker on the high pressure setting. That’s 11.6 psi, or, for the SI folks, 79,979.18, ah hell, call it 80,000 Pascals.
I put them in cold in a basket over one cup of water, run for three minutes at pressure, then quick release and plunge into cold water. They peel perfectly every time. Sometimes too easily, when I color Easter eggs with the grandchildren I like to kind of crackle the shell before dying to give a colored design to the egg underneath, but if done in the pressure cooker crackling the shell results in it falling off.
To summarize the second article:
Use older eggs, not fresh ones. Any store-bought egg is sufficiently old, as they sit for 30+ days during handling. This is for ease of peeling. Fresh eggs do not peel well.
Put the egg into already hot water. This can be boiling water or steaming the eggs. Steaming eggs works faster because you don’t have to wait for as much water to come to boil, just a small layer at the bottom of the pot and a steaming basket to hold the eggs.
Drop eggs into boiling water, cook for about 30 seconds, then drop the temperature to a low simmer (bubbles beginning to form).Thehigh temperature sets the outside of thewhites to aid peeling.Cooking at a low simmer keeps the temperature around 180 °F. (You can use a thermometer, or justuse the bubbles as a guide.)This allows the temperature inside the egg to even outso theyolk gets done without overcooking the white and forming a green yolk surface.For steaming eggs, there is no need to drop the temperature.
Cook for 12 to 15 minutes. It is harder to overcook because you keep the water temp at the right level that holds the eggs at the perfect cook temperature*, so duration isn’t critical as long as you cook sufficiently long.
When you remove the eggs from the heat, shock them with ice water, and fully cool them. The cold water shock helps prevent the divots in the bottom end so the eggs are more fully round, and this process also helps the egg peel easily.
Viola! Perfect hard boiled eggs with no green yolk and easy to peel.
According to the article, the keys to easy peeling are to put the eggs in after the water has reached temperature, not put in cold water and heat with the water; and cold shocking the egg when removed from the heat, plus allowing to fully cool. Slow heating and slow cooling lead to the egg and shell binding.
Also, he looked at pressure cookers, but recommends against them as they cook at a higher temperature than boiling or steaming. Thus, there is a tighter window for perfect eggs. One minute difference means the difference between still soft yolk center and green skin on yolk.
If you get good results consistently from your method, then there’s no harm continuing to do it that way. But he did actual experimentation, data collection, and even double blind evaluation (a separate blinded test administrator from the cook, and a different blinded egg peeler who rated how easily they peeled).
I came here to say exactly this. I’ve tried many of the methods here, but once I tried in a pressure cooker I stopped bothering with anything else. Before you even get started peeling the shell is typically already detached from the whites thanks to the quick release of pressure. And no need to fuss about the eggs being too fresh!
Another vote for steaming. We tried everything else. Steaming is the only method we’ve found that works 100% of the time.