Fermented pepper sauce

[TomNJ]

I just picked a few pounds of ripe Serrano and Tabasco peppers and want to try making a fermented hot sauce (I usually make a non-fermented sauce). In searching for recipes online, all of the sites seem to agree that adding the right amount of salt is important, but there is no consensus on what that right amount is.

There seems to be two approaches. One is to just add salt to the chopped peppers and let it ferment. It appears in this method the salt should be 2% of the weight of the peppers.

The other approach is to ferment in a brine, which is what I want to do. Here I see salt listed as 5 to 10%, but it never says percent of what! Is it 5% of the weight of the peppers, 5% of the added liquid (brine), or 5% of the total mixture?

Often the recipes show tablespoons of salt per volume of water, but the amounts per cup of water varies from 1/2 TBS to 1.5 TBS - that's a 3X difference! Also, the amount (weight) of salt in a tablespoon can vary by as much as 100% depending on how fine of a grind. For example, my table salt lists 2400 mg of sodium per teaspoon, while my Kosher salt (coarser grind) lists 1120 mg sodium per teaspoon. Good golly miss Molly!

So if the salt ratio is so important, why is there no clear consensus on the right ratio?

Can anyone provide a little guidance here?

TomNJVA