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I am aware of many of things that bacon has going for it. It is high in fat, high in salt, and smoked.

But taking a potato, frying it, covering it in salt, and sprinkling on liquid smoke, does not taste like bacon. (Yes I've tried. I try liquid smoke on everything.)

So what is it that yields that characteristic bacony flavor? Obviously it can be isolated since there are a plethora of products that are marketed with a bacon flavor.
http://www.thinkgeek.com/brain/whereisit.cgi?t=bacon&x=0&y=0

How can I impart some quantity of beautiful bacony flavor to other dishes while avoiding all the saturated fat and nitrates? I am asking specifically about isolating the flavor- not more healthy bacon substitutes.

Sobachatina
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The big missing thing in your description (fat, salt, smoke) is umami. You can see this in bacon-flavored products. For example, bacon salt (click on a "nutritional info" link) contains monosodium glutamate.

So if you want to make something bacon-flavored, short of using bacon (and possibly draining away a lot of fat), you're generally going to be looking for source of umami; see "What foods are high in umami?" or "What is a good vegetarian source of umami flavour?".

Also, bacon is definitely not acidic, and perhaps slightly sweet. This means, for example, tomatoes are probably not a good way to get the umami, and that whatever you do, you might try adding a tiny touch of sugar to bring out the flavor a little more. Things like shitake mushrooms and nori seem like better flavor matches. (If you've had furikake this shouldn't be too surprising.)

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Cascabel
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I don't think lard, msg and liquid smoke would purely get you bacon. Umami translates (very poorly translated) to "savoury". It's found in lots of things, like meat, fish, ripe tomatoes, fermented stuff (cheeses, mushrooms, etc...) and according to wikipedia, breast milk. Assuming umami (and maybe smoke) are the major flavours in bacon, I'm not sure how much umami you'd need to extract to say "mmmm Bacon".

However, in digging around I found this science video that claims to be able to use roasted shitakes (very high in umami) taste like bacon. Further digging produced this recipe, which is essentially the same with addes soy and liquid smoke (to up the umami even further and add the "smokiness" of bacon).

So, while I'm sketpical... there are at least three people on the internet that think that if you can concentrate enough umami flavour into something, you can make it taste something like bacon. Or maybe it's just shitake mushrooms...

talon8
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