To overcook food means to cook it for too long or at too high a temperature, ruining its taste and texture. Overcooked vegetables turn mushy and gray instead of staying crisp and colorful. Overcooked chicken becomes dry and tough, making it hard to chew. Even cookies can be overcooked: they come out of the oven hard as rocks instead of chewy and delicious.

The problem with overcooking goes beyond taste: overcooked food also loses vitamins and nutrients. A perfectly cooked steak is juicy and tender, but an overcooked steak turns into something that feels like chewing shoe leather.

You can also overcook things that aren't food. A joke gets overcooked when someone keeps repeating it long after it stopped being funny. A story becomes overcooked when a writer adds too many unnecessary details and loses the reader's interest. In these cases, overcooking means taking something past its best point, where more effort actually makes it worse instead of better.