We model hadronic matter in terms of its quark constituents by taking into account its internal flavor (u,d,s) and 3 colors degrees of freedom within the string‐flip model, which has quark clustering at low density, color deconfinement at high density, and dynamically interpolates between both limits via a many‐body potential that simulates the gluon flux tubes. A variational Monte Carlo simulation in 3 spatial dimensions is performed to study the transition to strange matter from both a non‐relativistic and a semi‐relativistic approach. The non‐relativistic one shows that the system has continuous and discontinuous phase transitions while the semi‐relativistic approach has purely continuous transitions. In both cases clustering correlations are found to remain important in the strange matter domain and strange matter to be absolutely stable. © 2003 American Institute of Physics